‘Railing’ on the highway

Video: State official says damaged guardrail is not unsafe

The center median barrier that separates the four lanes of traffic on U.S. Highway 27 north of the Tennessee River tells a story.

Sleepy drivers, wireless phone users and speeders all have made their impact — literally — on the rickety steel box-beam guardrail divider.

“It’s an obsolete barrier,” said Jennifer Flynn, a Tennessee Department of Transportation spokeswoman. “We’ve been trying to nurse it along, keep it maintained, for years. We know it looks horrible, and we couldn’t stand it anymore.”

By August, the Transportation Department will replace the barrier with a temporary cement wall. The department will unseal bids for the project today.

The guardrail was an eyesore for the department’s regional director, Bob Brown, who pushed to get it replaced.

“The current barrier has become increasingly difficult to maintain, plus the looks of the rail leave much to be desired,” Mr. Brown said.

Ms. Flynn said the barrier poses no safety risk. The top portion of it is 1,200 pounds of solid steel and the supporting legs, while some are missing, serve only to keep the rails upright. In places where the railing is mangled badly, only a serious impact at full speed could have caused that sort of damage, Ms. Flynn said.

“It sort of scares me a little,” said Maria Shoemaker, a Red Bank resident who uses Highway 27 to commute to work downtown. “I always feel sort of spooked out in that area, but it’s great if they can fix it or get something new. Maybe it won’t look so dangerous.”

The current barrier might look rough, but Ms. Flynn said it is solid.

“If it was a safety risk, we wouldn’t have waited,” she said. “The parts weren’t being made for this railing anymore. We had a few replacement parts on our maintenance lot a few years ago, but now we don’t have the parts to fix it.”

On top of that, the heavy metal requires a crane for repairs, which ties up traffic and is manpower intensive, she said.

Ms. Flynn said the metal barrier’s replacement, a cement wall, is the best bet because it can be used elsewhere when a planned widening of that stretch of Highway 27 gets under way in a few years. She said the Department of Transportation has a variety of lane dividers at its disposal: cable guardrail, steel guardrail and concrete barrier rail.

Those all are used in different applications, but the basic purposes, she said, are to prevent vehicles from leaving the road and traveling into oncoming traffic, losing control on an unrecoverable slope or crashing into solid objects.

Cable barriers are being tested to separate north- and southbound traffic on the interstate system in the Chattanooga area.

Tennessee Highway Patrol Lt. Patricia Riggs said some of the cable barriers work well, but in some instances no barrier between the lanes would work better than the cable systems.

“If the median is flat, you need something, because we’ve had some pretty bad head-on crashes,” Lt. Riggs said. “But if the median is pretty steep, that’s enough to keep the cars from crossing over” in an accident, he said.

She agreed that replacing the Highway 27 barrier with a concrete wall probably is the best way to prevent a head-on crash.

Ms. Flynn said the cable system was installed in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville last summer as a test. Several varieties of cable barrier are being tested for wider application.

The idea is that the 3-foot-tall cable system will catch cars at their wheel wells and keep them from crossing into oncoming traffic, she said.

The barrier also prevents motorists from turning around in the median, which is illegal and can be a hazard, Ms. Flynn said.