Father’s quest for roadside safety ends in Manitoba

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This article was published 20/10/2021 (1627 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After the death of his daughter five years ago, a Tennessee man is looking to conclude his quest to rid the U.S. and Canada of what he alleges is a dangerous piece of roadside equipment in Manitoba.

Five years ago, 17-year-old Hannah Eimers was killed on the way to school when the Volvo she was driving was speared by a guardrail product called X-Lite.

Speaking to the Sun over the phone on Tuesday, her father, Stephen Eimers, said Hannah was eviscerated in the incident.

“Hannah was 17, she had graduated high school at 15 and had already started college at the local community college,” Eimers said. “She was headed back to school that morning and went off the road on Interstate 75 in McMinn Country, Tenn., and the guardrail went through her car … This produced injuries similar to weapons of war.”

After the incident, he discovered he was not the only person to have lost a loved one in spearing accidents involving X-Lite.

“It had been banned before her death and left on the roadside, and it was only my daughter’s death that prompted the state of Tennessee to proactively pull these off the roadside,” Eimers said. “That’s a particularly bitter pill to swallow, that they knew this was defective and used my daughter as a final piece of data to issue a recall.”

In an op-ed published in The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville last week, Eimers wrote of other deaths he’s heard about in Tennessee and Maryland, as well as a woman in Massachusetts who lost a leg to one of the devices. When he did a story with CBS National News, he learned the story of a U.S. Marine who died while in uniform in an accident involving X-Lite.

Last year in French River, Ont., an accident involving one of the guardrails led to a woman having a foot amputated.

That inspired him to advocate for the banning and removal of those guardrails, which he said have now been banned in all 50 American states and every province in Canada — except Manitoba. The devices themselves are no longer manufactured, but they still linger in some locations in which they’ve been installed.

His advocacy has been covered by media outlets across North America and during the 2018 Super Bowl, Eimers actually paid $1,000 for a Super Bowl ad in Palm County, Florida — where former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club is located, hoping to get Trump’s attention to his cause.

Eimers is now calling on Manitoba Infrastructure to remove all X-Lite guardrails from its roads and highways before any lives are lost.

Earlier this month, Eimers contacted Manitoba Infrastructure to state his case for the removal of X-Lite.

In a response from the department, of which a copy was provided to the Sun, director of traffic engineering Glenn Cuthbertson thanked him for the information and said the first stage of a review into X-Lite usage in the province revealed 171 units installed throughout Manitoba.

“The next stage of the review is ongoing and includes the development of a mitigation plan on this issue,” Cuthbertson wrote.

The Sun contacted Manitoba Infrastructure for further information on the mitigation plan, but no response was received by press time.

Part of the reason X-Lite could go on the market in the first place, according to Eimers, is that the company that performed crash tests with the product was owned by the manufacturer and the testing results were falsified.

This is backed up by a document issued by the Missouri Department of Transportation that Eimers sent to the Sun, which states that manufacturer Lindsay Technologies misrepresents the results of crash testing and that X-Lite had failed four different crash tests before it went on the market.

Followers of American news might have heard about the massive trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that is currently winding its way through the U.S. Senate.

One of the elements of the bill is something that Eimers has been fighting for; if passed, manufacturers of products like X-Lite wouldn’t be able to have safety tests performed by companies they have a financial interest in.

To try and hold the company that manufactured the guardrails responsible, Eimers and his family are currently involved in a wrongful death lawsuit related to Hannah’s death.

All of this, Eimers said, has been in service of making sure no more families go through the same “hell” his family has experienced.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark