One Man’s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail
Steve Eimers met Melissa Falk at Bethel Baptist Christian Academy, in upstate New York, when she was a senior and he was a junior transfer student. Steve, the son of a local preacher, bet a classmate that he’d be dating Melissa by Christmas; to expedite the process, he superglued his hand to hers in class. He lost the bet, but still managed to win her over. They married in 1996. Their first child, Hannah, arrived three years later. She had her father’s blue eyes, and, as she grew up, his sympathy for outcasts and his love of J. R. R. Tolkien became hers, too.
Steve and Melissa homeschooled Hannah. They had moved to eastern Tennessee in 2001, for lower taxes and more land. Steve started a window-washing business, and they began acquiring goats and chickens. Soon, they had two more children. Steve had always imagined that he’d adopt one day, and, when their kids were growing up, he travelled to Eastern Europe with their church to donate supplies to orphanages. In 2007, he and Melissa went to Ukraine, where they met children who, he said, “were going to get trafficked or conscripted—who had no chance.” The couple came back with three boys. They had another biological son a few years later. That made seven. Steve thought that was plenty, but, in 2013, he and Melissa heard about a pair of siblings in northern Tennessee, ages nine and thirteen, whose parents were opioid addicts, and so the family took them in, too. Then, in 2016, a friend of Hannah’s accidentally became pregnant, and Melissa gave Steve a familiar look. “We were in our early forties,” he told me. “We were tired. But Hannah said they were talking about termination.” They decided to adopt the baby. That made ten.
The Eimers bunch enjoyed playing Uno—the Ukrainian boys learned the game before they understood English—and walking to local waterfalls together. Hannah was a generous older sister. She’d contributed to the cost of her siblings’ adoptions by putting on magic shows, and, once they arrived, gave up her own bedroom. She was bright, curious, cheerful, and easily fixated on unusual things, another quality she shared with her dad. “She’d sing at the top of her lungs in Walmart to test societal norms,” Steve told me. She trawled thrift stores and worked at the mall as an Easter bunny. By twelve, she was reading Tolstoy. By fifteen, she’d matriculated at a local community college. The summer after her freshman year, she interned on the set of a Burt Reynolds film. She wanted to work in costume design one day.
Melissa remembers watching Hannah dress up for a party on Halloween in 2016. She was going as an obscure character from a live-action role-playing game. Hannah had told her parents that the party was in Athens, and at first they had assumed she meant Athens, Tennessee, about forty minutes away. But the party was actually in Athens, Georgia: a four-hour drive. That night, Hannah and a friend set out in Hannah’s Volvo S80, a car her father had picked because it had a good safety rating. “I remember it like a snapshot,” Melissa told me. “Hannah putting on red lipstick and a white shirt, looking in the mirror across the hall. She was super chipper. It was a singsongy goodbye.”
In the early hours of November 1st, Hannah was driving home when her Volvo drifted off Interstate 75 and collided with a steel guardrail. She was sober and was going under the speed limit but was tired—she’d nodded off, apparently, as her friend slept in the passenger seat. Hannah’s car hit a safety feature known as a terminal end, a black-and-yellow-striped rectangular box at the end of the rail, designed to absorb kinetic energy. In a collision like this, the terminal end should give way and slide along the metal strip of the rail, slowing the car down and forcing the rail to curl up before it. Instead, this guardrail tore through the Volvo and cut Hannah’s body in half.
Steve was filling a coffee mug, preparing to go deer-hunting, when Hannah’s friend’s mother called to tell him there had been an accident. (The friend was unscathed.) When he reached the authorities, they said that no emergency transport had been dispatched to the scene. Steve understood that this meant there had been no doubt that Hannah was dead. He and Melissa got in their car and drove toward the crash site, but stopped midway. “I lay down in a Walmart parking lot,” Steve told me. “I couldn’t move. Our pastors came and picked us off the ground and took us home.” Eventually, Steve collected some of Hannah’s hair from the Volvo’s back seat. Months later, Tennessee’s Department of Transportation mailed the Eimers household a bill for three thousand dollars, asking Hannah to pay for the guardrail that killed her. (The agency eventually apologized, claiming that there had been “a mistake somewhere in processing.”)
One day not long after Hannah’s death, Steve Eimers felt an urge to look up “guardrail crashes” on the internet, and discovered hundreds of news stories about cases where people had been maimed or killed when striking them. He learned that what happened to Hannah occurred often enough that the guardrail world has a term for it: “spearing.” As he carried out more research, he also came to believe that the guardrail involved in Hannah’s crash was defective. In 2017, he filed a wrongful-death suit against Lindsay Corporation, the manufacturer of the rail, alleging that it did not follow federal and state guidelines for the design of guardrails, and that, because the company had failed to provide adequate instructions, the rail had been improperly installed. The suit was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. (The settlement terms prohibit Eimers from discussing what was wrong with the rail involved in Hannah’s crash.) After that, Eimers shut down his window-washing business and began to focus full time on a new mission: preventing anyone else from dying the way Hannah did.
Eimers has since driven some forty thousand miles through twenty-five states to inspect guardrails. “I can identify types of guardrails from satellite view,” he told me. “It’s urban bushcraft.” He documents many of these inspections on his YouTube channel, best known by its handle, @TheGuardrailGuy, where he posts videos of himself roaming the country with calipers, a six-foot level, and an eye for backward bolts and loose cable anchors. The videos, which he broadcasts to some quarter of a million subscribers, have an endearingly unvarnished quality. In a typical one, Eimers might choke up; break down a complicated concept in physics; quote one of his favorite film protagonists, the bumbling shopping-mall security guard Paul Blart; or utter an adopted Southern colloquialism such as “dadgummit.”
Melissa is astounded that he has so many fans. She finds the minutiae of guardrails “extremely boring.” While she sleeps, Eimers stares at images of guardrails across the world, checking for fatal flaws. Faulty rails spring from his memory the way other people recall bad dates. He told me about a rusted-out guardrail in Townsend, Tennessee, with a mouse living inside of it that bit his finger, and a guardrail in rural Georgia from the fifties that was missing eighty-five bolts. He continued, “I once walked from Constitution Avenue to the White House and found that the five guardrails closest to the President were installed with random parts. They still are.”
Based on his research, Eimers believes that there are about a thousand guardrail-related deaths each year in the U.S.—virtually all of them preventable—and tens of thousands of miles of dangerous guardrails presently on the country’s roads. He maintains an extensive archive of research, which includes a record of every time a President mentions guardrails (as Donald Trump did in 2018, when he remarked on a “sucker” guardrail: “I want to hire whoever their salesman is . . . that is the worst crap”). In what Eimers calls a “master impalement log,” he keeps lists of various kinds of crashes—crashes involving the brand that killed his daughter, crashes involving a rail installed upside down or backward, crashes involving celebrities. Also “oddities,” as when “a truck full of Pop-Tarts hits a guardrail days after the inventor of Pop-Tarts dies,” leaving Pop-Tarts “all over Interstate 640.” He uses this material to work the press. Jennifer Titus, a Tampa Bay TV reporter, has done dozens of stories with Eimers, and remembers the first call she got from him. “I had no clue what he was talking about,” she told me. “I said, ‘Look, can you just find me a dozen improperly installed guardrails on Florida roads?’ ” The next day, he sent her a list of seventy; Titus confirmed their dangers independently. “The state reinspected all the guardrails in Florida as a result of our inquiry,” she said. “He files as many open-record requests as I do.”
“I know I’m not normal,” Eimers told me. “I’m one of those people who count ceiling tiles. My weird brain latched on to guardrails, and it won’t let go.” A guardrail-company executive recently told me, “Steve evolved from a grieving father to a vindictive-seeming father to a credible individual to the Erin Brockovich of the guardrail industry.” He went on, “He’s in the top ten per cent of the most knowledgeable people in the room at a meeting of guardrail experts.”
On a Saturday in early March, I met Eimers on the shoulder of a four-lane highway outside Lenoir City, Tennessee, the town near Knoxville where he and his family live. Many of his neighbors were fishing for crappie. But for Eimers, who is fifty, it was a big day: he was going to meet his congressman, Tim Burchett, whom he’d been lobbying about guardrails since 2017. As I approached, Eimers, in jeans, a reflective vest, and a cap that read “Guardrail Guy,” was looking at a steel rail a few feet from the blacktop. The rail, he said, had been damaged by “reckless pounding.” He recalled Trump’s rhetoric about bureaucratic obstacles to solving relatively simple problems. “We have the President talking about ‘the speed of Trump’ and ‘we’re going to break down these walls,’ ” he said. “Well, break down these walls, for crying out loud!” Soon, Burchett pulled up in an oversized pickup with expired tags. He is a sixty-one-year-old MAGA conservative who lives on a farm and builds longboards from scrap wood. Wearing a suit, seemingly against his will, he offered Eimers a fist bump. “Hey, dude,” he said turning to me.
To the casual observer, which is to say virtually everyone, a guardrail is just a long wavy strip of steel, about a foot wide, set thirty inches or so off the ground, which keeps a car from going off the road. But, in reality, guardrails are carefully calibrated systems of interlocking parts, every one of which is critical to its function. They rely on complex physics to insure that a car that hits the end of a guardrail doesn’t get impaled, and that a car that hits it from the side can’t crash through. Some guardrail injuries result from antiquated designs, or designs that manufacturers know to be dangerous. Others result from botched installation.
Eimers directed Burchett’s attention to the rail he had been looking at, and pointed out that it had a misshapen post, which had probably been damaged during installation. In a head-on crash, posts like these and their special bolt notches should release the rail, causing it to curl up like ribbon beside the vehicle. “I call this the LeBron James post, because when it’s hit, it has to flop over,” Eimers told Burchett, who stared silently. This one, Eimers went on, was unlikely to do that, because of the bludgeoning of the post and the placement of the bolts. Many guardrails, he added, are even more messed up. In 2022, Eimers bought a few thousand stickers with an arrow and the words “THIS SIDE UP” on them, which he then slapped on guardrails installed backward or upside down. He made a video of the stickers, which has been viewed sixteen million times; a major guardrail manufacturer, Valtir, subsequently produced an installation sticker of its own.
Eimers wants the government to do more to encourage good corporate behavior. “They’ve abdicated their role to a guy from rural East Tennessee with ten kids, thirty chickens, and a bunch of goats,” he said. Burchett, who had previously been in the state legislature and now chairs DOGE’s congressional subcommittee, which examines the use and misuse of federal resources, said, “We hated the federal government for good reason. I hate it and I’m in it now. I hear you.” He told Eimers that he’d try to get a congressional hearing on the topic of guardrails.
After the meeting, Eimers and I drove to his house, where I met Melissa, who was fixing sweet tea, and a few of their children. Then we walked around the back, to what the family calls Hannah’s Garden, a little pergola featuring painted references to some of her favorite things—Dorothy’s ruby-red pumps from “The Wizard of Oz,” the time machine from the TV show “Doctor Who”—alongside a typewriter and a ukulele. “There wasn’t a whole lot to bury,” Eimers said, before he turned away and began to cry.
The term “highway” can be traced back to Old English, and originally referred to elevated Roman thoroughfares. In the U.S., the word came into circulation around the start of the twentieth century, to denote roads that were grander and more adaptable than rural post routes, which were maintained by the government, or the longer, privately funded thoroughfares known as “auto trails.” In 1921, the Federal Aid Highway Act gave the word an official definition, subjecting it to regulation. At that point, the country had some nine million touring cars, including the popular Ford Model T, which could reach a white-knuckling forty miles per hour. Road surfaces were disconcertingly variable—dirt was most common, but pebbles, bricks, and creosote-soaked wooden blocks were also used. There was no overarching plan connecting the states. As a later report put it, the Federal Aid Highway Act aimed to, at minimum, “get the farmer ‘out of the mud.’ ”
Thirty-five years later, President Dwight Eisenhower signed another major highway act, which would create more than forty thousand miles of federal highway—still the largest public-works campaign in American history. As cars and roads multiplied, accidents began to pile up; by the mid-sixties, there were more than fifty thousand fatal highway accidents per year. The automobile industry downplayed the dangerous designs of vehicles and pointed to unsafe drivers instead. Many of the highway-safety features that we consider standard now were afterthoughts. “A lot of people felt you should not light highways—that it was distracting—and that a nice wide median was all you needed between opposing lanes,” Earl Swift, the author of “The Big Roads,” a history of America’s highways, told me. “So these things, like guardrails, came along piecemeal.”
The earliest guardrails, constructed in the thirties and forties, basically resembled those of today. But their blunt ends, which did not release upon impact, were even more deadly. In 1932, as the Times noted, in one of many such stories, a sailor on furlough died when his Ford V8 Tudor “impaled itself” on a Nebraskan rail. Among the earliest proposed solutions was the turndown guardrail, which, instead of ending abruptly, gradually slopes downward into the ground.
In March, Eimers and I visited Dean Sicking, a mechanical engineer and an inventor, who has contributed to almost every major guardrail innovation of the past four decades. Sicking, a bearded and bespectacled sixty-eight-year-old, lives with his wife in Birmingham, Alabama, in a large French-country-style house. Sitting in his kitchen, he remarked, dryly, that the turndown was “a brilliant idea, apart from one thing.” Where it had prevented the possibility of spearing, it introduced a new problem: the launch. “It’s like ‘The Dukes of Hazzard,’ ” Eimers explained.
Sicking has designed and patented groundbreaking safety technologies for football (helmets), equestrian sports (helmets), and hockey (boards). In 2007, President George W. Bush honored him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, which hung on one of the walls in his kitchen. Guardrails have proved to be his greatest challenge. He began working on them in 1980, when he was a junior researcher at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Using data from General Motors, he started to predict accident rates, and came to believe that safety was a tractable problem. “Our basic philosophy was that running off the road shouldn’t carry a death sentence,” he said.
Today’s guardrails are designed to absorb or redirect collisions coming from angles of less than twenty-five degrees, as the overwhelming majority of guardrail crashes do. When a vehicle hits the face of the rail—the side you see when driving past—the rail should bend but not break, holding tension, like hockey boards or seat belts. This prevents the car from crashing through the rail—known as “gating”—or flying over it. Though turndown guardrails can still be found, most now begin and end with the rectangles of steel known as terminal ends. Their ability to absorb the energy of colliding cars—forcing rails to curl up, rather than spear—is the result of decades of clever engineering.
Sicking’s inventions include the ET-2000, patented in 1989, a terminal end that would grab on to a colliding car to slow it down; the Sequential Kinking Terminal, from 1997, which used kinks or bends in the rail to help absorb an impact; and the Next Generation Terminal, the first design to prevent cars from breaching a rail when they hit it from a glancing angle. “Assuming installation isn’t fucked up,” he said.
In America, guardrail systems are sometimes installed—and, much more often, repaired—by local crews of laborers who have no real familiarity with how they work. As one guardrail executive told me, “Often you get guys that are plowing snow in the winter and cutting grass in the summer.” He went on, “They go to a yard where they’ve got a pile of parts—a bracket here, bolt there, a rail that looks like it’ll fit—and they install it.” In guardrail jargon, the practice of assembling a rail with a hodgepodge of parts is known as Frankensteining. Because Frankensteining disrupts the physics involved in guardrail systems, it can be deadly. In 2010, a man in Florida swerved to avoid an animal in the roadway, striking a guardrail maintained by untrained prison inmates. He lost a leg. According to the man’s lawsuit against the state Department of Transportation, the rail had been constructed using a “random collection of parts . . . including an obsolete piece of guardrail built in 1965.” Eimers estimates that about five per cent of the guardrails he inspects are Frankensteined together.
On our visit, Sicking told Eimers that if Hannah had crashed into one of his innovations, correctly installed, she’d be alive. This wasn’t news to Eimers, but he began to sob. Then he suggested that we take a ride. Eimers drove the two of us to the closest guardrail, which was also the closest defective guardrail. “Dr. Sicking lives around the corner from a monstrosity,” he said.
The rail, which lined a four-lane road near an overpass, was an egregious assembly of one of Sicking’s older designs. “We have some major, major issues here,” Eimers said. He pointed to an empty inch-long opening in the middle of a steel panel, then to a bolt drilled into a post a few inches away. The empty slot was where the bolt should have been. He surmised that the installers had mismeasured the length of the panel and “solved” the problem they’d created by drilling a hole where there hadn’t been one. When struck, this bolt wouldn’t release—the improvised slot was the wrong size—and the rail would not curl up, as it should. Instead, a terminal-end collision would likely result in a spearing or a rolling of the vehicle, Eimers said, and if a vehicle hit it from the side the rail might rupture. Sicking looked on mournfully. “If you’re drilling holes in my guardrail, you’re fucking up,” he said.
I asked Eimers, who once worked as an emergency nurse, how the guardrail might damage a human body if it was hit head on. “A C1 or C2 fracture,” he guessed, referring to potentially fatal neck injuries. “A lacerated aorta. A mutilated victim.” He guided Sicking around some fire ants to inspect a bearing plate—a small piece of metal that anchors the first post to the guardrail and helps distribute force. It was also misaligned. “They just pounded the ever-living snot out of this,” Eimers said disgustedly.
In April, Eimers and Melissa travelled to Atlanta to meet with a few families who had lost relatives to guardrails. Eimers lists his phone number on his YouTube page to make it easy to reach him. “Every time I see a number I don’t recognize, I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach,” he told me. “But I have to pick up.” All of the families he met that day had relatives who, like Hannah, had been killed on I-75, the highway that runs from near Miami all the way up to the Canadian border. Jaida Payne, a doctoral student in physical therapy, was killed in January, 2023, when she crashed into a damaged rail in Tampa. In March, 2020, Hunter Burns, a garage-door installer, hit a guardrail installed upside down and backward in Bradenton, Florida. That same day, Isabella Alonzo, a high-school senior, hit a Frankensteined guardrail near Warner Robins, Georgia. Payne was twenty-three, Burns twenty-two, Alonzo eighteen.
Eimers had already been in close touch with their parents. “It takes a special kind of person to live through the horror, and then to keep putting himself in position to see it, experience it, on a daily basis,” Cathy Alonzo, Isabella’s mother, told me, of Eimers. “But sometimes you have to slow him down and tell him to explain all these darn guardrail abbreviations in English.” Cathy has a tribute to Isabella tattooed on her forearm that reads “SHE IS THE MOON, A SHINING LIGHT IN THE DARK SKY.” Mark, her husband, remembered their daughter’s accident and the attempts to save her. “She had a strong heart, and they brought her back four times before she just bled to death. I had to stop them from reviving her, because . . .” He paused. “And the bad thing about it is they left that guardrail there for months.”
Christy DeFilippo, Hunter Burns’s mother, who was wearing a polo shirt with the words #HuntersMom embroidered onto it, described the rail that killed her son. “Instead of crumpling like an accordion, like it’s supposed to, it launched him in the air,” she said. Payne’s father, Stewart, a former Marine drill instructor, had been dabbing his eyes with a napkin. He had recently become the newest member of what Eimers calls his Army of Davids—as in David and Goliath—a group of guardrail-reform advocates which is trying to get companies to release more detailed instructions for installers and lobbying governments to enact installation and maintenance laws. He had started a guardrail-focussed TikTok account called Exit 261, named for the location of his daughter’s death. He described Jaida’s guardrail impact as “like an I.E.D.”
“If that guardrail was repaired right, she would have survived,” Payne said.
“We shouldn’t know each other,” Eimers agreed.
The morning after Eimers showed Burchett the faulty rail near Lenoir City, he forwarded me a bill he’d stayed up late drafting, titled “Guardrail Manufacturer’s Transparency Act.” (He considered putting “IKEA” in the name, to signal the simplicity that guardrail installation should aspire to, but decided against it.) Among other things, the bill sought to mandate clearer labelling for guardrail parts, and to require that manufacturers distribute setup manuals in various languages, including Spanish. He sent it to Burchett’s office, then e-mailed to follow up, writing, “Somebody’s child hangs in the balance.” A few hours later, he e-mailed again with a message about a girl who had just been killed by a guardrail in Maine.
In late April, Eimers went to D.C. to make his case in person. He wore a “Guardrail Guy” T-shirt, and carried an Emmy won by a TV reporter for a segment they’d worked on together. The city was choked with traffic thanks to a visit from King Charles. Eimers had a tea bag in his pocket, which he occasionally pulled out while remarking, “No kings.” He was accompanied by several families who had been affected by guardrail accidents. One of the people with him was Jett Weinstein, a twenty-year-old from Arizona who lost a leg in 2024, when, on the way back from a snowboarding trip, a car he was in hit a guardrail and was speared. His friend, who was driving, was cut in half and killed. “I’m always in pain,” Jett said, matter-of-factly.
The group’s first meeting was with Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman representing a West Tennessee district. Seated beneath a poster on the wall reading “One man can make a difference, and every man should try,” Eimers placed the Emmy on a table before him and delivered his pitch. At one point, he offered Cohen the opportunity to be “the Guardrail Guy’s assistant.” Cohen was surprised that systems as complex as guardrails didn’t come with instruction manuals. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “I’ve got a CD: thirty-two dollars, and it’s got thirty-four dollars’ worth of instructions.”
After bumping into Senator Richard Blumenthal in a hallway—“I’m Steve, the Guardrail Guy,” Eimers began, to Blumenthal’s bewilderment—they met with Senator Mark Kelly, an engineer and a former astronaut who represents Arizona, in Kelly’s office, where he displays one of his old space suits. Kelly was particularly struck by an e-mail from 2005 between executives at Valtir—then known as Trinity—which Eimers had obtained through an anonymous source and printed out. It showed an executive discussing a guardrail the company had modified in 2005, and effectively admitting that it had become more dangerous. “What will be our liability exposure if someone has an accident and the folded rail enters into the vehicle [and] kills or maims someone? Then the lawyer finds this crash test and says that it is inherent to the design for this to happen. It did it during the crash test.” The company, the executive acknowledged, “put a faulty design into the world.” Kelly kept the printed e-mail.
A few weeks after Eimers’s D.C. trip, Burchett’s legislative director e-mailed him a draft of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill. The bill would be part of the proposed reauthorization of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a trillion-dollar funding package passed in 2021, which expires in September. Of the eight-hundred-odd-page bill, more than eight pages—the entire section on guardrails—were effectively lifted from Eimers’s “Transparency Act.” When Eimers called me to share the news, he was nearly shouting: “It’s almost one per cent my language!” The bill’s text is currently being finalized before a likely vote this fall. In late June, Eimers also learned that the guardrail we looked at with Sicking had been fixed, after the state carried out a reinspection, prompted by a complaint Eimers had filed. The Frankensteined guardrails closest to the White House were finally scheduled for replacement, too, thanks to him. “I often get cynical, because I expect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turns,” Eimers told me. “I once had someone tell me that the most influential people in history often only ever get a one-degree turn of the ship, which seems inconsequential—but over time you end up at a completely different destination.” He added, “My problem is that I know that I am, on a subconscious level, looking for something that will take away the pain. I could get every highway guardrail in the world fixed, and it wouldn’t fix me or bring Hannah back.”
Eimers is fond of quoting from a scene in Tolkien’s “Return of the King,” when the humble hero Sam thinks, “In the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” Hannah loved the hope in that line, Eimers told me. He mentioned something she’d written in her diary ten months before she died. “I realized why I’m writing this journal,” she wrote. “I am absolutely terrified I’m going to die and just be another face in the photographs. . . . Names are forgotten. They don’t have stories.” She went on, “As long as I can keep the interest of whoever is reading this, I have a reader. There. Now you’re in my story. Hope that keeps you interested, whoever you are.” ♦