The Tennessee Department of Transportation announced they would be moving forward in the removal of faulty guardrails throughout the state.
Hannah Eimers, 17, was driving on I-75 last November when her car drifted off the road and hit a guardrail.
The X-Lite guardrail impaled her vehicle and instantly killed Hannah. It was a crash her family believes she would've survived had it not been for a faulty guardrail that the State was already questioning.
"TDOT knew this was dangerous, that it wasn't performing well. They removed it but their policy was to leave it on the road playing russian roulette with people's lives," Hannah's father, Stephen Eimers said.
"Some of the issues associated with the guard rails kind of had us asking some questions," TDOT Chief Engineer and Deputy Commissioners Pal Degges said.
Degges went on to say their concerns and questions surround X-Lite's specifications in instructions for contractors.
"We didn't feel that we could get an adequate response to those questions so we removed the product from our qualified products list," Degges said. "How these products are reacting, particularly the high speed type crashes, we felt it was appropriate to remove, roughly about a thousand units on our system."
That decsion was made on Oct. 25, about week before Hannah's accident. Since then TDOT will move forward with the removal of X-Lite guardrails in areas where the speed limit exceeds 45 miles per hour.
"We want to design a forgiving road to where if somebody has a crash that its either recoverable or survivable," Degges said.
