Highway Official Stood By Guardrail System Amid Doubts

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U.S. highway safety officials defended a widely used guardrail system’s crashworthiness even as they worried whether its design had been altered in a potentially deadly way, according to internal e-mails.

Starting in 2012, a Federal Highway Administration engineer fielded e-mails from state officials, plaintiffs’ lawyers and others asking about a change that Trinity Industries Inc. had made to its guardrail system years earlier.