The New Yorker: One Man’s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail – no paywall. “In 2016, Steve Eimers’s daughter died when she hit a defective guardrail. Then he learned that the country was full of them….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.”