Launch year 2005 | Current supplier Trinity Industries | |
Invented by Texas A&M Transportation Institute | ||
The ET-Plus Guardrail system was designed at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and is manufactured by Trinity Highway Products, LLC, based in Dallas, Texas. The guardrail end terminal absorbs the impact of a crash. The wooden or steel posts break and the guardrail collapses. The end terminal slides along the guardrail, extruding the guardrail and pushing it to the side. The ET Plus® was originally accepted by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for use on roadways on January 18, 2000. FHWA continues to consider the ET Plus® eligible for federal reimbursement. In 2005, upon the recommendation of TTI, Trinity changed the ET Plus® guide channel from five inches to four inches, and TTI successfully crash tested the revised product. Based on the crash test results, the FHWA accepted the ET Plus® with a four-inch guide channel as a crashworthy device, making it eligible for Federal aid reimbursement. Later, it was alleged that the Trinity design change caused the ET Plus® to malfunction. A False Claims Act lawsuit filed in 2012 against Trinity alleged that Trinity made those changes without properly reporting the changes to the FHWA. However, prior to May 18, 2015, FHWA did not expect submitters to notify FHWA of "non-significant" modifications if the modification was thought to have no effect on how the device would slow, stop, or redirect the vehicle. Tests have since shown that the ET Plus® guardrail systems performs the way they should, and after a five-month voluntary suspension of shipping, Trinity resumed shipping and selling the ET Plus® on October 23, 2015.
Overview
The end terminal cap had been first tested in 2005 and over 200 thousand have been used on United States highways. In 2005 and 2006, five crash tests were done showing the ET-Plus a failure by spearing a vehicle or flipping it. Trinity argued that the tests were on an experimental system, and that the guardrails on the roads are safe.
Trinity competitor Joshua Harman, a Virginia guardrail installer, was a whistleblower in a federal False Claims Act suit. The suit accused Trinity of failing to properly notify the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of a change of size in the guide channel from five to four inches. The change from five inches to four allegedly saved the company $2 per end terminal. In October 2014, federal jury found Trinity guilty of fraud by not properly reporting a change of one inch made to the ET-Plus end terminal system. The lawsuit resulted in a fraud verdict of $175 million, which under FCA statute is tripled. In October 2014, federal jury found Trinity guilty of fraud by not properly reporting a change of one inch made to the ET Plus® end terminal system. In June 2015, the federal court certified the verdict and assessed the final penalty at $663 million. Joshua Harman, the whistleblower for the case, was awarded more than $16 million in legal fees and $2.3 million in expenses. Harman was also awarded $199 million, thirty percent of the judgment. Trinity is currently appealing the verdict before the Fifth Circuit.
Immediately following the verdict, the FHWA requested additional crash testing of the ET Plus. Trinity agreed to the tests and also voluntarily stopped the sale of the units, pending completion of the testing.
The tests were conducted in December 2014 and January 2015 at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas with officials from FHWA, AASHTO and the Virginia Department of Transportation in attendance. The company conducted a series of eight crash tests at 27-inch and 31-inch heights to conform with the prevailing standard for guardrails of this type: NCHRP Report 350. After a review by the FHWA and an independent expert, in March 2015 the FHWA announced that the ET Plus® ET Plus passed all eight crash tests, and that the product remained eligible for federal reimbursement. At that time, 40 states had suspended the use of guardrails.
In January 2015, the FHWA commissioned a peer review of the report "Relative Comparison on NCHRT 350 Accepted W-Bean Guardrail End Terminals" conducted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. All four reviewers raised concerns about limitations or flaws in the study’s methodology, which led all of the reviews to question the validity of the study’s findings and conclusions.
Following Joshua Harman’s contention that there were multiple versions of the four-inch ET Plus®, the FHWA and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) collected measurements of more than 1,000 ET Plus® devices to ensure the sets were representative of actual guardrails in use. The FHWA/AASHTO joint task force report released in March 2015 refuted Harman’s allegations and affirmed that the guardrails tested in were representative of those in use on the nation’s highways.
In April 2015, The U.S. Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into Trinity Industries.
In September 2015, the FHWA and AASHTO released a second joint task force report titled, “Safety Analysis of Extruding W-Beam Guardrail Terminal Crashes.” The report concluded that there are no unique performance limitations that can be attributed to the ET Plus®, that there are real-world conditions that exceed the performance expectation of all end terminal systems, and that additional crash testing of all existing Report 350-compliant end terminals would be irrelevant and uninformative. The report also cited installation, maintenance and repair as factors affecting product performance.
On October 23, 2015, Trinity Highway Products announced that it would resume shipping the ET Plus to fill orders as they are received and accepted.