I am here in Virginia waiting to go tomorrow morning to the IIHS’s Vehicle Research Center in Ruckersville for the Underride Roundtable. I wish that I was not here–not because I’m not looking forward to it, because I am. I am expecting it to help move us forward as a country to improving underride protection.
The reason, of course, is that I’m here because we lost AnnaLeah and Mary. And in the aftermath, we discovered that they might not have died if the underride guard had been stronger–more effective. But the federal standard did not require it to be so.
And that is why we are here: to change that. For somebody else.
We stopped at IIHS before going to our motel so that we could set up a table filled with handouts on the history of failed underride protection, as well as photos and mementos of Mary and AnnaLeah. Let no one forget the point of the gathering: to create survivable crashes in order to save lives.
Participants will see this reminder at our table:
