Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Gene Kennedy Reporting A man going 70 miles per hour slams into a cement barrier on the highway. Troopers say he's lucky to be alive. They say one thing saved him, and it's not his seatbelt.
It's a freeway device designed to absorb impact if you drift off the freeway. It's called a crash attenuator.
They're all over freeways in the valley. You can see that they have striped warning signs on them and actually poke out from the end of a croncrete barrier. If your car drifts off the freeway, you want to hit this, not the concrete barrier.
The crash on Highway 201 just before midnight proves how valuable these attenuators can be. The Utah Highway Patrol believes a 27-year-old driver dozed off or was distracted and slammed into one of these attenuators at about 70 mph. Right after the crash, a medical helicopter took him to the University of Utah hospital. He is in critical condition.
But if he had hit a concrete barrier and not the attenuator, it could've been much worse.
Sgt. Keight Dockstader/Utah Highway Patrol: "This is a perfect example where this crash attenuator, it's a possibility that it saved his life. There are definitely several instances in the past where that's happened also."
When the victim hit the attenuators it basically exploded because it absorbed the energy of the impact. In this case, replacing one of these will cost somewhere between two thousand and five thousand dollars. But emergency officials say that's what they're there for, and it sure is much better than losing a life.
