Design And Construction Of A Concrete Vehicle Restraint System: Fill & Download for Free

Frequently Asked Questions: Barriers, Terminals, Transitions, Attenuators, and Bridge RailingsFHWA barrier guidance is contained in the AASHTO Roadside Design Guide. However, FHWA field offices often raise numerous issues that involve interpretations, extrapolations, device selection, hardware deployment, or simply trying to fit safety devices into real world conditions.These questions and answers offer clarification on the use of roadside hardware for issues not covered by FHWA policy or topics that simply need additional explanation. They are the considered opinions of engineers in the FHWA Office of Safety Design and the FHWA Resource Center with helpful input from members of the American Traffic Safety Services Association's Guardrail Committee.In general the questions relate to rigid and semi-rigid barrier systems. The Office of Safety's July 20, 2007, memorandum on Cable Barrier Considerations dealt with numerous issues of cable barrier design, selection, and placement. Additional guidance on cable barrier selection and placement on sloping terrains and adjacent to median ditches will be provided in conjunction with National Cooperative Highway Research Project 22-25, scheduled for completion in early 2010. A similar project (NCHRP 20-7(257)) synthesizing information on portable concrete barrier shapes, connections, anchorages, and other considerations will also be completed soon.As noted at the end of the FAQ list, we expect to develop additional guidance in this format. Please contact Mr. William (Will) Longstreet at [email protected] if you have a special need for guidance in any of those areas, or to suggest others.BarriersIs it OK to use Weathering Steel (sometimes called Cor-Ten, A-588, or Rusting Steel) in longitudinal barriers?Can 6x8 inch timber, W6x9 steel, and W6x8.5 steel posts be used interchangeably in the length-of-need section of guardrail?Can I use a water-filled barrier on my project instead of concrete barrier?Which concrete barrier shape should we use – Jersey Barrier, "F-Shape," Constant-slope, Single Slope, or vertical?Do portable concrete barriers need to be tied down?Can I attach a channel shape or some other device to the pavement behind portable concrete barrier to keep the barrier from sliding?Do cable barriers pose an extraordinary safety risk for motorcyclists?What guidance is available on the timeliness of guardrail repair?What is "guardrail?" Our agency only uses "guiderail."The Office of Safety's July 10, 2008 memorandum, "Consideration and Implementation of Proven Safety Countermeasures," asks states to review their policy on placement of barriers in medians up to 50 feet wide. Does this include divided highways without access control such as rural expressways and divided urban arterials?Where Do I Measure the height of the guardrail from?Why is the w-beam construction tolerance now only one inch?How do we handle the height transition between G4(1S) and MGS and their terminals?Our guardrail crosses a culvert and we can't drive a post. Can we omit the post?Can we pave a mow strip under our guardrail?CAN WE PLACE GUARDRAIL POSTS IN A CONCRETE SIDEWALK OR MEDIAN?How can we design our barriers to be "motorcycle-friendly?"Many of our guardrail terminals have a steel bearing plate on the first post that sometimes rotates until it is upside-down. is this ok?How do we know that damaged barrier needs repair?What guardrail hardware must be replaced or upgraded on the NHS?What kind of foundation do we need for our concrete median barrier?What about the national trend to go greener and the growing preference for smaller, lower profile vehicles? Is a higher rail needed for the future?Will there be similar new height requirements for box beam rail?Have there been a statistically significant number of crashes and/or fatalities with the lower height rail that is driving the increase in height or is it all based on crash testing and simulation?Would a nominal height of 29" +/- 1" with an 8" blockout be acceptable? At what height is a 12" blockout recommended? Can you adjust the simulation to test heights between 27-3/4 and 31"?How was the 31" height selected? Did small car performance, testing, or simulation play a role?When do you need to raise the guardrail when an overlay has reduced the height?How high do you need to raise guardrail that is lower than 26 ½ inches? What are the best ways to do that?I thought a non-gating terminal captured everything that hit it?May a decorative texture or graphic design be added to the face of a crashworthy concrete barrier?May computer modeling be used as a substitute for full-scale crash testing of new devices?Do we need to have the vertical devices (road tubes, vertical panels, etc.) in place when crash testing a "curbing" system as a work zone device in Category II.Barrier Terminals and Crash CushionsWhen repairing crash-damaged guardrail terminals or crash cushions, may we use "breakaway posts" or other components that fit if they are supplied by another manufacturer?Our highways are signed for 75 mph. Shouldn't we use crash cushions that have been crash tested at speeds higher than 100 km/hr (62.5 mph)?What is the difference between energy absorbing terminals and those that allow the vehicle to break through?When can I use a non-redirective crash cushion?What type of crash cushion should I use?What if my state challenges all or part of the Roadside Design Guide?Is it appropriate to use re-galvanized or salvaged guardrail posts and rail in longitudinal barriers for new construction and/or maintenance repair projects?Is it appropriate to use re-straightened guardrail w-beam panel?How do you handle guardrail posts when using in expanded polystyrene (EPS) fill, the geofoam, lightweight fill since it won't create the support needed for proper resistance of the guardrail when hit? Can you simply extend the posts?Would drilling a new hole in the Midwest Guardrail System (MGS) guardrail weaken the system?Are there other products (w-beam guardrail systems and terminal sections) currently being tested?Have terminal sections for 31" w-beam guardrail been found eligible without blockouts or do all systems have either 8" or 12" blockouts? Can they be used with systems without blockouts?May existing eligible NCHRP350 w-beam terminals that were tested at minimum height of 27¾ inches be installed as per existing FHWA Memorandum 'ACTION: Roadside Design: Steel Strong Post W-beam Guardrail' dated May 17, 2010?TransitionsAre "lead anchors" acceptable when connecting the guardrail end shoe to the concrete parapet or end block?Bridge RailingsDo bridge railings on reconstructed bridges off the NHS need to meet NCHRP Report 350 criteria?BarriersIS IT OK TO USE WEATHERING STEEL (SOMETIMES CALLED COR-TEN, A-588, OR RUSTING STEEL) IN LONGITUDINAL BARRIERS?A. No, the use of weathering steel guardrail should be limited. Where aesthetic concerns are primary, weathering steel guardrail may be used if the owner agency adopts a frequent periodic inspection and replacement schedule.Roadside barriers and bridge rails are usually close enough to the travelled way that they can be sprayed with water from passing traffic. In most parts of the country this water contains deicing chemicals during winter months. In seaside locations in warmer climates the salt laden air deposits corrosive chemicals on barriers. In northern climates plows can throw snow onto the rail and the abrasive action of the snow can erode the protective layer. When exposed to these environments, weathering steel never develops the 'patina' that slows corrosion as in other less aggressive environments. Within a few years significant section loss may result. The interior of box beam barriers and the lap splice of w-beams can corrode rapidly to the point where the barrier may become more hazardous than the feature it was meant to shield.Weathering steel may continue to be used on the backside of the Steel Backed Timber rail as the steel thickness is significantly greater than the typical 12 gage w-beam section.One accommodation that has been tried is using zinc foil at the w-beam overlap where the zinc's galvanic action slows the corrosion. Use of thicker sections (exclusive of the terminal) may also prolong the life, but maintenance should still include inspection of the sections and joints. Powder coating of galvanized guardrail is an acceptable aesthetic option.Barrier terminals are also subject to section loss at rail splices, but pendulum tests have been conducted on highly weathered barrier rails using galvanized extruder-type terminals and crash-test performance has been satisfactory. Questions on aesthetic treatments of barrier terminals should be addressed to the manufacturer.CAN 6X8 INCH TIMBER, W6X9 STEEL, AND W6X8.5 STEEL POSTS BE USED INTERCHANGEABLY IN THE LENGTH-OF-NEED SECTION OF GUARDRAIL?A. Yes. Crash testing under NCHRP Report 350 has shown that these posts may be substituted when not in a barrier terminal. For short stretches of damaged barrier it is probably better to use the same type posts as in the existing installation, but where longer sections must be repaired substituting posts is acceptable. Some states use 8-inch round posts for w-beam guardrail, but there is not sufficient performance information to offer a recommendation on whether they may be substituted for steel or rectangular wood posts. Some proprietary guardrail and cable barrier posts have also been shown to be interchangeable with the generic posts. Recent crash testing [see NCHRP Project 22-14(3)] under the AASHTO Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) has shown that there may be a difference in performance between steel post systems and wood post systems, especially when the top of the rail is less than 27 ¾ inches high.CAN I USE A WATER-FILLED BARRIER ON MY PROJECT INSTEAD OF CONCRETE BARRIER?A. Yes, but only if it includes a steel framework that has been accepted as crashworthy. To explain why, these definitions apply:A "barrier" is a device that safely redirects, slows, or stops an errant vehicle and prevents a more severe crash or prevents vehicles from entering the work area. A "barricade" is a lightweight channelizing device that warns motorists of a hazardous situation and offers little or no resistance when hit. For example, a barrier offers "positive protection" to shield workers in a work zone from being hit by an errant motorist while a barricade does not. A "channelizer" is a line of traffic control devices used to delineate the traveled way.Barriers include w-beam guardrail, jersey barriers ("K-rail" in California), steel barriers, bridge railings, weak post cable barriers, certain water-ballasted plastic units, and crash cushions. They must be crash tested at 100 km/hr using a small car and a pickup truck to assess occupant risk and barrier integrity. The test vehicle may not penetrate or vault over a barrier. When put in place each unit must be physically connected to the next unit per the state standard or per the manufacturer's instructions. If the units are merely butted end to end, or if the connection hardware is missing a hazard exists that is dangerous to both the traveling public and the workers.Barricades must have orange and white reflectorized striping in accordance with Part 6 of the MUTCD, and include Type I and II "sawhorse" barricades, Type III Road Closure barricades, and some large plastic units that accept water ballast, among others. Barricades must be crash tested at 100 km/hr with a small car to ensure that they do not cause harm to occupants of the impacting vehicle when they are struck.A hybrid device called a "longitudinal channelizing device" or "longitudinal channelizer" consists of large plastic units linked together, end to end, forming a wall. They are useful for controlling pedestrian traffic, guiding vehicles through confusing work zones, discouraging the use of median crossovers, and providing more delineation when only a line of cones or drums are typically used. A longitudinal channelizer is not a barrier because, upon impact by a vehicle, the plastic units rupture and the vehicle penetrates the wall. Some longitudinal channelizers can be converted into crashworthy barriers with the addition of continuous steel rails or by virtue of an internal steel framework.Now the answer to the question: Concrete "New Jersey" Barrier or "K-rail" that is properly installed and connected will redirect most impacting vehicles. Certain "water filled barriers," namely those with internal or external steel rails or frames, can also contain and redirect vehicles. Without these external steel rails or the internal steel framework, water filled longitudinal channelizers do not have the capability to redirect vehicles and may not be substituted when a barrier is specified. Because of the confusion over water filled barriers and channelizers that look alike, the FHWA, the AASHTO/AGC/ARTBA Task Force 13, and the American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA) support the use of clear labels on each water-filled unit that explain its purpose as a channelizing device or as a barrier unit. A discussion and a sample label, will be posted on the Task Force 13 web site (see PAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE)Please note that barrier deflection should be carefully considered. Precast concrete barriers have lower deflection and can also be pinned in place to severely limit deflection upon impact.WHICH CONCRETE BARRIER SHAPE SHOULD WE USE – JERSEY BARRIER, "F-SHAPE," CONSTANT-SLOPE, SINGLE SLOPE, OR VERTICAL?A. All these shapes are acceptable. Generally, the F-Shape or the 9.1 degree constant slope are preferred, since the F-shape design was specifically engineered to limit the potential roll over and the 9.1-degree constant slope reasonably mimics that performance. Another consideration may be the nature of the traffic using the facility or future overlays.An explanation of the differences in the shapes may be useful. The Jersey- and F-shape barriers are both "safety-shape" barriers that begin with a 3 inch vertical face at the pavement level. Then they break to a sloped face that goes up to 13 inches above the pavement on the Jersey barrier, but only up to a height of 10 inches in the case of the F-Shape. Both then transition to a nearly vertical face to the top of the barrier.The Texas Constant-Slope Barrier is 1070 mm (42 in) high and has a constant-slope face that makes an angle of 10.8 degrees with respect to the vertical. California developed a Single Slope profile that makes an angle of 9.1 degrees with respect to the vertical. The crash tests indicate that the performance of the Texas Constant-Slope Barrier is comparable to that of the Jersey-shape and the performance of the California Single-Slope Barrier is comparable to that of the F-shape.A vehicle impacting one of the safety shape designs will have a significant portion of its energy absorbed in the climbing or lifting action that occurs when the tires roll up the lower sloping face. In low speed impacts this may result in the vehicle's redirection with no sheet metal contact with the face of the concrete wall. In medium speed impacts there will be damage to the vehicle but the occupants will experience minimum forces. In high speed impacts to safety shaped walls there will be significant vehicle damage and minor to moderate injury potential to the occupants. For the Jersey barrier there is a much greater likelihood that a small car will be rolled by the "safety shape" profile. The F-shape design was specifically engineered to limit the potential for small cars to roll over upon impact.Vehicles impacting the single slope barrier or vertical wall will experience little potential for roll-over. However, the barrier will absorb none of the crash energy by lifting the vehicle – there is always sheet metal damage and the occupants get the full force of hitting a concrete wall. The vertical wall has similar impact parameters, with the added potential for an occupant's head to hit the wall if the wall is high enough.A benefit of the constant slope, single slope, or vertical barriers is that multiple overlays can be applied without affecting the shape, and therefore the performance, as long as the total height remains adequate. Both "safety shapes" allow for no more than three inches of overlay.In general, for high speed highways the single slope barrier is most appropriate to limit rollovers, since much of the fleet now has side airbags to absorb the impact to the occupants. The side impact airbags improve the safety of the occupants. For lower speed roads, the F-shape would be better for the majority of impacts the barrier would be expected to handle.DO PORTABLE CONCRETE BARRIERS NEED TO BE TIED DOWN?A. It depends. If you are placing the barrier near the edge of a bridge deck a catastrophic failure could occur if a vehicle caused the barrier to deflect enough to push it over the edge. If the barrier were placed on pavement with a work area on the other side, then more deflection can be tolerated and bolting it down usually is not necessary. Barrier deflection in this case may, indeed, push the concrete into the work area, but there appears to be little if any data relating to workers injured when the barrier is deflected and caused it to slide into the work area.CAN I ATTACH A CHANNEL SHAPE OR SOME OTHER DEVICE TO THE PAVEMENT BEHIND PORTABLE CONCRETE BARRIER TO KEEP THE BARRIER FROM SLIDING?A. No. If the barrier is struck by a vehicle tall enough to push it across the deck the barrier could 'trip' over the channel shape and tip over, allowing the vehicle to intrude into the work area. The only acceptable location to secure a barrier is in front so that the anchors will resist the overturning moment.DO CABLE BARRIERS POSE AN EXTRAORDINARY SAFETY RISK FOR MOTORCYCLISTS?A. Motorcyclists worldwide have raised this concern. First, the unprotected motorcyclist is at great risk anytime he or she goes off the roadway at speed and contacts a barrier or any other object. Second, there is not sufficient evidence that the cables cause the severe injuries. Reviews show that the barrier posts cause the greatest number of injuries (other than the cyclist going completely over the barrier and impacting the ground or some other unforgiving hazard.) Since the post spacing on cable systems is typically two to three times greater than the post spacing on steel beam systems, cable systems allow a greater potential for the rider to avoid striking the posts.We also note that some European installations (notably in Sweden and the UK) place cable systems in the paved roadway where there had been no median (known in England as the "central reserve"). The cable barrier separates traffic on "two plus one" roads that have three lanes, two lanes in one direction and one in the opposite direction. This puts traffic very close to the barrier and allows very little room for error for motorcyclists or other vehicle drivers. The proximity of the barrier to traffic also results in an increase in the number of impacts, but motorcyclists are much more vulnerable and have more reported crashes. Cable barrier installations of this sort are not anticipated in the U.S.The European community addressed this question in "Barriers to Change: Designing Safe Roads for Motorcyclists" where it states "The Panel concludes that, despite the amount of high profile coverage that wire rope barriers have attracted, limited research does not warrant the inference that they are more or less dangerous than other types of barrier on the market."WHAT GUIDANCE IS AVAILABLE ON THE TIMELINESS OF GUARDRAIL REPAIR?A. It is important that each agency develop its own guidance for when to make repairs. While severely damaged roadside barriers need to be repaired within a reasonable amount of time, the FHWA cannot recommend a specific response time. Each agency must make a risk assessment about the timing of repair for each different category of damage and establish specific response times. The assessment would include, among other factors, agency resources (within its overall mission), hazard exposure (how likely is it that the guardrail will be hit again), and hazard severity. Vagueness on the timeliness of repairs does not prevent liability. Timing of repairs should be based on providing the safest facility, not on liability concerns, or on the State recovering damages from insurance companies before proceeding with the work.The performance of damaged guardrail was assessed in the NCHRP Project 22-23 "Criteria for Restoration of Longitudinal Barriers." Information on that study may be found at: http://144.171.11.40/cmsfeed/TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=696.When repair work is done under contract, the state should notify the contractor promptly when damage is discovered. The time that the contractor is given to respond should consider utility coordination (ie "Miss Utility" or "One Call" to avoid damaging subsurface utilities) and the fact that additional terminal grading or lengths of barrier may be needed to bring the device up to current standards. Special events and weather factors should also be considered when establishing mandatory response times.The FHWA has updated the publication "W-Beam Guardrail Repair" (Publication # FHWA-SA-08-002) which is available on line at: http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/local_rural/training/fhwasa08002/fhwasa08002.pdf.Information on the eligibility of Federal funding for replacement parts of safety features may be found at Federal-aid Program Administration.WHAT IS "GUARDRAIL?" OUR AGENCY ONLY USES "GUIDERAIL."A. These terms are synonymous. A few states are required by judicial interpretation to refer to steel beam barriers as "guiderail" because the barriers are not seen as devices that can guard motorists from all injuries. Rather, the steel beam system can only "guide" the car and its occupants. (In Europe, "guard fence" and "road restraint systems" are the common names for roadside barriers.)THE OFFICE OF SAFETY'S JULY 10, 2008 MEMORANDUM, "CONSIDERATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF PROVEN SAFETY COUNTERMEASURES," ASKS STATES TO REVIEW THEIR POLICY ON PLACEMENT OF BARRIERS IN MEDIANS UP TO 50 FEET WIDE. DOES THIS INCLUDE DIVIDED HIGHWAYS WITHOUT ACCESS CONTROL SUCH AS RURAL EXPRESSWAYS AND DIVIDED URBAN ARTERIALS?A. Criteria for installing median barriers on these facilities must consider much more than just median width and ADT. Chapter 6, "Median Barriers," of the2006 AASHTO Roadside Design Guide (RDG) includes the following discussion relating to non-access controlled facilities.Median barriers are sometimes used on high-volume facilities, which do not have fully controlled access. As indicated in Figure 6.1 ["Suggested guidelines for median barriers on high-speed roadways"], these median barrier guidelines were developed for use on high-speed, fully controlled-access roadways. Utilizing these guidelines on roadways that do not have full access control requires the need for engineering analyses and judgment, taking into consideration such items as, right-of-way constraints, property access needs, number of intersections and driveway openings, adjacent commercial development, sight distance at intersections, barrier end termination, etc. Therefore, trying to apply these guidelines to roadways that do not have full access control can be rather complex in many locations.While the FHWA believes each state should have policies that deal with median barriers on all divided facilities, the agency is not ready to issue national guidance for highways without full access control. During its 2009 meeting the AASHTO Technical Committee on Roadside Safety (TCRS) considered further refinement to the RDG discussion of median barriers for non-access controlled divided highways. The TCRS concluded that warrants for median barriers on these facilities were not feasible because of the lack of research on the topic. Moreover, valid crash data are limited as many states do not even have a separate coding element for crashes involving a vehicle that crosses the median of a divided highway. In addition, some agencies avoid calling for median barriers on lower speed facilities because they believe the barrier may encourage higher speeds. For the foreseeable future, each state should assess its own need to have a policy dealing with median barriers on highways without full access control.Finally, it's important to note that median bridge piers, culvert headwalls, non-traversable ditches, trees, and other fixed-object hazards in medians are to be removed, redesigned, or shielded with barrier just like hazardous elements on any roadside. When barriers are placed to shield these features, the potential for impact from vehicles coming from the opposite side of the highway should be considered.WHERE DO I MEASURE THE HEIGHT OF THE GUARDRAIL FROM?A. There are a number of different scenarios for guardrail height measurement. Only the first one is easy:1) Guardrail is located above pavement: Measure the height from the pavement to the top of the w-beam rail.2) Guardrail is located 2 feet off of the edge of the pavement: Use a 10-foot straightedge to extend the pavement/shoulder slope to the back of the rail. Measure from the bottom of the straightedge to the top of the rail.3) Guardrail is located 2 feet off a recent pavement overlay: Follow the guidance in #2 above. You may have to re-set the barrier to achieve proper height. The gap between the pavement edge and the guardrail posts should be backed up with fill material to accommodate low-speed or shallow angle incursions.4) Guardrail is located down a 1V:10H slope: Measure from the nominal terrain. Good contractors can get fairly even grading, but it will rarely be perfect enough to always be spot on the design height. Use a string line or straight edge to even out terrain variations.5) Guardrail is located down a 1V:4H slope: If located more than 2 feet beyond the slope break point, remove the guardrail. Guardrail may not be placed on a steep slope. The Roadside Design Guide specifies where you may place guardrail on slopes as steep as 1V:6H, but guardrail must remain about two feet off the edge of the shoulder when there is a 1:4 slope behind it. (If steeper than 1:3 you may need longer posts, or additional posts, but that is yet another forthcoming FAQ pending the completion of ongoing research.)WHY IS THE W-BEAM CONSTRUCTION TOLERANCE NOW ONLY ONE INCH?A. Crash testing has shown that the standard strong post w-beam guardrail without rub rail is acceptable in the range from 27-3/4 inches to 30 inches above the ground. When the rail was tested at a lower height the pickup truck vaulted over the rail. A taller rail without rub rail can cause significant wheel snagging on small cars. This leaves a very narrow range of installation heights, and FHWA recommended 29 inches +/- one inch.The Midwest Guardrail System (MGS) tolerance is greater at plus one to minus three inches. The MGS was initially tested at its design height of 31 inches with 12-inch blockout with no rub rail. It was known that the performance would be acceptable down to 27-3/4 inch just like the G4(1S) but we wanted to encourage the taller initial height so we recommended a construction tolerance of just one inch from the design height of 31 inches. A subsequent crash test (in July 2010) of the MGS at a height of 34 inches using the small passenger car was successful (which is generally considered the worst case scenario for tall guardrail), and now testing with the MASH pickup truck at 34 inches (or above) is pending to confirm an installation tolerance of +/- 3 inches.HOW DO WE HANDLE THE HEIGHT TRANSITION BETWEEN G4(1S) AND MGS AND THEIR TERMINALS?A. You should transition from a 27-3/4 inch tall barrier or terminal to a 31-inch tall barrier over the span of two 12-foot, 6-inch pieces of w-beam rail. When replacing or repairing long portions of a damaged rail the new rail should be installed at the proper design height, transitioning down to the existing rail over the length of two 12 foot, six inch, pieces of rail at either end. W-Beam to Thrie-Beam bridge transitions may need to use the non-symmetric W-to-Thrie connector that keeps the top height of the entire rail at approximately 31 inches. In addition, there is no need to transition in height to many 27 ¾-inch high terminals. The SKT, FLEAT, and ET end terminals have all been tested and accepted at the 31-inch rail height and provide the benefits of 31" guardrail without transitioning in height down to a lower systemOUR GUARDRAIL CROSSES A CULVERT AND WE CAN'T DRIVE A POST. CAN WE OMIT THE POST?A. The Midwest Guardrail System (31-inch rail height) has been successfully tested with three posts omitted, leaving a span of 25 feet. Special posts (CRT, or Controlled Releasing Terminal posts) are used at either end of the gap but the rail does not have to be doubled up, or "nested" over the gap. Standard strong-post w-beam rail (minimum 27-3/4 inch rail height) can also be installed with three CRT posts at either side of a three- post gap, but the rail needs to be nested across the gap as well as up- and down-stream from the gap, for a total length of 100 feet. In addition, the MGS system is allowed to be placed closer to the headwall than the nested W-beam long span system.CAN WE PAVE A MOW STRIP UNDER OUR GUARDRAIL?Q: CAN WE PLACE GUARDRAIL POSTS IN A CONCRETE SIDEWALK OR MEDIAN?A. Concrete or asphalt pavement under the guardrail would have to be constructed with a gap behind the post and backfilled with a loose material to allow the post to move when the rail is struck. An asphalt spray surface treatment would be acceptable as it would not prevent post movement through the soil. There are also various commercial products that can be placed under the W-beam to block weeds. Check with the manufacturer to see that they have designed the product with post deflection in mind. The FHWA also provided guidance on this issue in 2004 in our memorandum "W-Beam Guardrail Installations in Rock and in Mowing strips," http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadway_dept/countermeasures/reduce_crash_severity/barriers/pdf/b64b.pdfHOW CAN WE DESIGN OUR BARRIERS TO BE "MOTORCYCLE-FRIENDLY?"A. Any time a motorcyclist leaves the roadway unintentionally there are likely to be severe consequences. Even the "safest" barriers can cause serious injury whether the motorcyclist is still on his/her bike or they are sliding/rolling on the pavement. Although there are many barrier modifications being used in Europe intended to moderate the severity of impact with guardrail posts, FHWA does not yet advocate the use of any such modifications on the NHS. As of Fall, 2010, there are two research projects underway that will analyze motorcycle crashes in depth. One is a general study of motorcycle crash causes, while the other is specifically targeting motorcycle impacts with roadside barriers. When these studies are completed, we hope to have information that will help us to determine the nature of motorcycle impacts with barriers, and whether or not the barriers can be redesigned without adversely affecting the good performance we have experienced with four-wheel passenger vehicle impacts to date.Q: MANY OF OUR GUARDRAIL TERMINALS HAVE A STEEL BEARING PLATE ON THE FIRST POST THAT SOMETIMES ROTATES UNTIL IT IS UPSIDE-DOWN. IS THIS OK?A. No. This bearing plate (8 x 8-inch square with an off-center hole) must be installed with the longer dimension upright (5" dimension up and the 3" dimension down). If the cable slackens over time traffic vibrations may allow this plate to rotate downward due to gravity. If this happens the ability of post #1 to fracture in a head-on impact (thus preventing a snag point) is severely compromised. On wood posts, a nail can be driven to prevent this rotation. A solution that works on both wood and steel breakaway posts is to specify that this steel plate be fabricated with tabs on either side that will wrap around the side of the post an inch or so to prevent rotation. This is an acceptable modification to all crashworthy terminals that use this 8 x 8-inch bearing plate. Of course, it is still critical to install the bearing plate with the 5" dimension up and the 3" dimension down. (The function of the bearing plate is to transfer load from the cable to the end anchorage.)HOW DO WE KNOW THAT DAMAGED BARRIER NEEDS REPAIR?A. Small dents and dings do not seriously affect the performance of guardrail. Vertical tears and bent posts are a different matter. A recent NCHRP study was completed and published as "Criteria for Restoration of Longitudinal Barriers" and it is available for download at http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_656.pdf. Also, the 2008 FHWA guide "W-Beam Guardrail Repair" is available for download at: W-beam Guardrail Repair Guide - Safety.WHAT GUARDRAIL HARDWARE MUST BE REPLACED OR UPGRADED ON THE NHS?A. On September 29, 1994, the FHWA Executive Director signed a memorandum "ACTION: Traffic Barrier Safety Policy and Guidance" that identified various items that were to be inventoried and scheduled for replacement or upgrade if found within the clear zone. The FHWA Headquarters did not conduct a formal follow up to that memo. But now, more than 15 years later, it is time all remaining examples of these devices/situations be scheduled for correction as soon as practical. Terminals meeting NCHRP Report 350 or MASH are to be used.The following terminals/transitions should be upgraded on the NHS:Blunt End Terminals* for W-beam guardrail or median barrier.Turned-down terminals*Bridge approach guardrail that is not connected to the bridge railing.The following device is to be upgraded whenever encountered within the limits of a project on the NHS:4. Breakaway Cable Terminal***Versions of these terminals may be used on the downstream end to anchor the rail if they are outside the reverse direction clear zone and/or cannot be struck by vehicles crossing the centerline or median, impacting from the opposite direction.** The BCT may also remain as a downstream anchor if outside the clear zone. It is also acceptable for use within some cable-to-guardrail transition designs. A crash test of the BCT as a Test Level 2 device failed.WHAT KIND OF FOUNDATION DO WE NEED FOR OUR CONCRETE MEDIAN BARRIER?A. Many variations exist between highway agencies regarding reinforcing and footing details for concrete median barriers; however, there have been few reported problems with any particular design and a need for a standard detail is not apparent. Concrete median barriers develop loads as a function of the barrier capacity and the foundation capacity. While it is true that some median barrier designs have been show to work with minimal foundation design, this does not suggest that any median barrier design can be installed in this manner. Thus, it falls on the designer to consider the combination of barrier and foundation that meets the design impact loading safely.WHAT ABOUT THE NATIONAL TREND TO GO GREENER AND THE GROWING PREFERENCE FOR SMALLER, LOWER PROFILE VEHICLES? IS A HIGHER RAIL NEEDED FOR THE FUTURE?A. "Green" vehicles such as battery powered cars are larger and heavier than the 820C test vehicle of NCHRP Report 350, so the additional rail height should not be detrimental when considering the future vehicle fleet.WILL THERE BE SIMILAR NEW HEIGHT REQUIREMENTS FOR BOX BEAM RAIL?A. No. The metric version of the box beam is 27 1/6 inches tall, and that is the height at which it was tested. The difference from a 27" high box is negligible, especially since the box beam is a weak post system where the box separates quickly from the post and stays in contact with the vehicle.HAVE THERE BEEN A STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF CRASHES AND/OR FATALITIES WITH THE LOWER HEIGHT RAIL THAT IS DRIVING THE INCREASE IN HEIGHT OR IS IT ALL BASED ON CRASH TESTING AND SIMULATION?A. The recommendations for increased w-beam height are based on crash testing and an increase in the number of high center-of-gravity vehicles currently traveling on highways and roads compared to the 1960's when the 27-inch standard was set.WOULD A NOMINAL HEIGHT OF 29" +/- 1" WITH AN 8" BLOCKOUT BE ACCEPTABLE? AT WHAT HEIGHT IS A 12" BLOCKOUT RECOMMENDED? CAN YOU ADJUST THE SIMULATION TO TEST HEIGHTS BETWEEN 27-3/4 AND 31"?A. Conventional G4 (1S) strong-post guardrail at 29 inches to the top of the rail should have 8-inch blockouts. The size of the blockout is not simply a factor of the height of the guardrail. When the 30- inch maximum height of the G4(1S) guardrail is exceeded an entirely different system is encountered. The generic MGS system with a nominal height of 31" has a blockout that is 12 inches deep, and splices between the posts. The MGS and some of the proprietary 31" systems have the advantage that they will also meet crash test criteria at lower heights, but should be installed at 31" (or slightly higher to accommodate forthcoming overlays). This is also discussed in Chapter 5 of the RDG.HOW WAS THE 31" HEIGHT SELECTED? DID SMALL CAR PERFORMANCE, TESTING, OR SIMULATION PLAY A ROLE?A. In the early 2000's the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (MWRSF) conducted a study to develop a better-performing roadside barrier. That research indicated that the performance of the G4 (1S) strong steel post guardrail improved when the splices were moved to mid-span. Increasing the blockout depth also improved crash test performance, as did raising the height of the rail from 27 3/4" to 31" which reduced the embedment of the post. The MGS represents the combination of these factors. The MGS has also been crash tested with 8" blockouts and Texas DOT is currently (June 2012) preparing to submit a Request for Eligibility.) Other systems were subsequently developed that also have a 31-inch mounting height.WHEN DO YOU NEED TO RAISE THE GUARDRAIL WHEN AN OVERLAY HAS REDUCED THE HEIGHT?A. The AASHTO Roadside Design Guide, 4th Edition, states that guardrail that is at least 26 ½ inches high after an overly may remain in place. (See RDG p. 5-17)HOW HIGH DO YOU NEED TO RAISE GUARDRAIL THAT IS LOWER THAN 26 ½ INCHES? WHAT ARE THE BEST WAYS TO DO THAT?A. The guardrail should be raised to 29 inches, which represents the target height for new installations of strong post w-beam systems. If the pavement work requires the barrier to be moved, then the posts should be carefully extracted and, if in good condition, re-driven at the new location so that the rail will be at 29 inches. If the barrier does not need to be moved, then raising the blockout up to three inches is a common practice. This will require field drilling or punching of a new hole in the guardrail post.I THOUGHT A NON-GATING TERMINAL CAPTURED EVERYTHING THAT HIT IT?A. Under the criteria of NCHRP 350, capturing every vehicle that impacts the nose of the terminal was not a requirement for a non-gating system. The test with a 2000P vehicle impacting at an angle of 15 degrees on the nose of the system (Test 3-33 for 100 kph) can have the vehicle penetrate the system and proceed a considerable distance behind it. However, under the new MASH criteria, there is a specific requirement for non-gating systems that any hit on the nose or near the nose "should contain and redirect the vehicle or bring the vehicle to a controlled stop; the vehicle should not penetrate . . . ." Therefore, the criteria being used, (NCHRP Report 350 or MASH) dictates whether a system should be called "gating" or "non-gating." So, it is important to know how a system performs and where the impacting vehicle will end up under each of the required impact tests on the nose - zero degrees, at an angle (5-15 degrees depending on the criteria), or on the side.Regardless of the type of system being used, a safe runout distance is needed beyond the beginning of the system, either for the situation where the vehicle passes through the system, or where the vehicle just misses the end of the system and continues behind it. Likewise, proper grading providing an essentially flat pad and traversable side slopes to ensure stability of the vehicle is needed, regardless of the type of system. The terminal is only re-directive beyond the point of length of need, which should be specified by the manufacturer.MAY A DECORATIVE TEXTURE OR GRAPHIC DESIGN BE ADDED TO THE FACE OF A CRASHWORTHY CONCRETE BARRIER?A. Yes, but the relief of that texture is subject to certain limitations. These limitations are detailed in the NCHRP Report 554 "Aesthetic Concrete Barrier Design."http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_554.pdfMAY COMPUTER MODELING BE USED AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR FULL-SCALE CRASH TESTING OF NEW DEVICES?A. No. FHWA determination of Federal-aid reimbursement eligibility of roadside hardware is performance-based, which means full-scale crash testing under the AASHTO Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware is needed to establish such eligibility. Manufacturers developing new hardware are encouraged to use Finite Element Analysis (ie: LS-DYNA) to develop their device using the Verification and Validation process as detailed in NCHRP Web-Only Document 179 (Procedures for Verification and Validation of Computer Simulations Used for Roadside Safety Applications (V&V)) procedures in efforts to refine their designs and reduce the cost of developmental crash testing. For existing devices that have already demonstrated that they comply with NCHRP Report 350, certain minor modifications to the system may be evaluated using Finite Element Analysis. In addition, any Finite Element Analyses that are submitted to FHWA as part of the documentation package for determining eligibility for reimbursement under the Federal-aid highway program should be accompanied by a Verification and Validation Report as detailed in NCHRP Report 22-24.DO WE NEED TO HAVE THE VERTICAL DEVICES (ROAD TUBES, VERTICAL PANELS, ETC.) IN PLACE WHEN CRASH TESTING A "CURBING" SYSTEM AS A WORK ZONE DEVICE IN CATEGORY II.A. Yes. MASH section 3.4.1 states "The test article should be constructed and erected in a manner representative of in-service installations and should conform to specifications and drawings of the manufacturer or designer." The FHWA has issued several letters for curbing systems since 2002 and the tests themselves have evolved to incorporate vertical elements starting in 2004. Over the next several years, more and more tests incorporated "delineator" style vertical elements as this became the in service condition of nearly all curbing systems utilized in this country.Return to topBarrier Terminals and Crash CushionsWHEN REPAIRING CRASH-DAMAGED GUARDRAIL TERMINALS OR CRASH CUSHIONS, MAY WE USE "BREAKAWAY POSTS" OR OTHER COMPONENTS THAT FIT IF THEY ARE SUPPLIED BY ANOTHER MANUFACTURER?A. Barrier terminals and crash cushions are precisely engineered devices that are subjected to a range of crash tests (up to 8 different tests) meant to show proper performance when impacted by errant vehicles. If the substitute parts do not crush, break, bend, or slide the same way as the crash-tested parts, the device's performance will be affected, with the potential for negative performance. (Even if the device's performance in one test may improve with the substitute part in place, it may lead to failure under another test impact condition.) If the component in question is covered by patent and unique to the system, then the overall effect can only be determined by the original manufacturer and/or a crash test laboratory.Substitutions of components are allowable if any one of these conditions is met:The substitute components are generic items (e.g. guardrail line posts, w-beam rail elements, some fastener hardware, etc.) that meet the same specification as the crash tested parts, orThe manufacturer of a patented device has determined that the part will not adversely affect the device's performance and has agreed that the part may be substituted, orThe substitute component has been successfully crash tested as part of the same system, orA critical or "smart" part that was formerly covered by a patent is manufactured to the same specification as the original part.This guidance applies to the safety performance of barrier terminals, crash cushions, and the barriers themselves when considering the use of substitute components.Most current guardrail terminals and impact attenuators are patented devices. Where the system, device, or components thereof are patented proprietary products, then the guidance in the January 11, 2006, FHWA Memorandum "Guidance on Patented and Proprietary Product Approvals" [Superseded: Guidance on Patented and Proprietary Product Approvals] should be followed. This memo contains a link to additional FAQs on the use of proprietary products in Federal-aid contracts.OUR HIGHWAYS ARE SIGNED FOR 75 MPH. SHOULDN'T WE USE CRASH CUSHIONS THAT HAVE BEEN CRASH TESTED AT SPEEDS HIGHER THAN 100 KM/HR (62.5 MPH)?A. No. The FHWA Office of Safety considers that a 100 km/hr test is representative of worst case run-off-road crashes.Early on in the panel discussions related to the NCHRP project for the updating of NCHRP Report 350, there was much discussion involving the need to increase test speeds over the 100 km/h (62.2 mph) maximum speed now used. Based on data available to the research team, it was concluded that regardless of posted speeds, most impacts with fixed objects occurred at somewhat reduced speeds, probably because most drivers are braking hard as they are about to run off the road or into some fixed object. Historically (from FARS data), crash cushions have been directly responsible for very few fatalities and even fewer of these can be attributed directly to inadequate cushion capacity. Granted, a longer cushion will perform better in some head-on full-speed crashes, but the cost-effectiveness of a 70 mph cushion over a 62 mph design is far from clear. FHWA's position is that highway features tested to Report 350 TL-3 (i.e., 100 km/h) are sufficient, but if any DOT wishes to use longer designs, they may. The best question to ask is whether or not there has been a performance problem with existing installations.WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENERGY ABSORBING TERMINALS AND THOSE THAT ALLOW THE VEHICLE TO BREAK THROUGH?A. All terminals dissipate energy during an impact, some more than others depending on impact conditions. It is agreed that in an end-on impact by a vehicle aligned with the terminal, "energy absorbing" terminals will dissipate more energy than "non-energy absorbing" terminals. However, there are also certain impact conditions in which both types of terminals dissipate essentially the same amount of energy. For these conditions the vehicle can be expected to travel a considerable distance after impact with either terminal type. Additionally, a vehicle that inadvertently leaves the road in advance of a terminal may be just as likely to miss the end as to impact it. Therefore, it seems prudent to require similar run out distances for both energy-absorbing and non-energy-absorbing terminals.The FHWA memoranda entitled, "Guidelines for the Selection of W-Beam Barrier Terminals," (October 26, 2004) and "Supplementary Guidance for the Selection of W-Beam Barrier Terminals" (November 17, 2005) contain additional considerations beyond those in the Roadside Design Guide (RDG). Guardrail run out distances and length of need requirements, as recommended in the RDG, are dependent on traffic conditions, guardrail layout, and the characteristics of the hazard to be shielded. They are independent of the terminal type, assuming that the point at which the length of need begins is the same for each terminal (normally 12.5 ft from the terminal's beginning).An energy absorbing terminal may be preferred where narrow right-of-way restricts the width of the clear roadside. An energy absorbing terminal can be installed parallel to the traveled way and can capture a vehicle that impacts it on the nose. However, with narrow rights-of-way come numerous unaddressed hazards including fixed objects and improper grading. It is not uncommon to see barriers used only to shield built hazards like the approach end of a bridge railing or a culvert headwall, but terrain and other natural obstructions such as ditches and trees are not addressed. Trees are the #1 fixed object that is struck in run-off-road crashes. When these hazards remain within the clear zone, the guardrail designer should ensure that the situation is not made worse when locating a guardrail terminal.WHEN CAN I USE A NON-REDIRECTIVE CRASH CUSHION?A. Care must be used in applying a non-redirecting, gating crash cushion. They are designed to decelerate a vehicle impacting head-on on the nose. Vehicle penetration is likely to occur for angle hits from the nose to near the mid-point of the array. Vehicle penetration / override of the system is possible for high speed, high angle impacts near the rear of the device.All gating, non-redirective crash cushions should be applied to hazards that are not likely to be impacted at an angle on the side at any significant velocity. They are appropriate on low speed facilities, and in work zones with higher speeds where lane widths are constrained and the potential for high angle hits is limited. Potential problems with these non-redirecting attenuators include vaulting over the nose of the attenuator into the work area, and inadequate clear run out areas behind the devices. Side redirect impacts into these devices are known to push acceptable safety limits and as such, their use in the field requires scrutiny to ensure adequate safety for both vehicle occupants as well as workers in downstream construction areas. Typical examples of non-redirecting/gating attenuators installed in a manner that increases the likelihood of compromised impact performance include: 1) not providing adequate clear run-out areas behind these units and 2) positioning them at sites where the probability of high-speed, severe-angle (i.e. - high energy) impacts is high.All users of these devices should be made aware of the factors that contribute to proper performance as outlined in the crash test report. Examples of non-redirecting, gating crash cushions include all sand barrel arrays, the Triton CET (Concrete End Treatment), ACZ350, NEAT, and the ABSORB 350.Please note that adequate clear run out areas are required for both non-redirective and redirective devices. The run out areas are longer for non-redirective devices. The additional length is typically the length of the non-redirective device.It should also be noted that non-redirective crash cushions such as sand barrel arrays can pose a hazard if impacted in the reverse direction on the heavy barrels adjacent to the rigid hazard. Impact in the reverse direction at this point in the array is untested and the large mass of the final barrels could cause rapid and violent deceleration of the impacting vehicle that would exceed our occupant risk limits.WHAT TYPE OF CRASH CUSHION SHOULD I USE?A. When more than one crash cushion / impact attenuator system is approved for use in your State, carefully evaluate the structural and safety characteristics of each candidate system for the site in question. These include such factors as impact decelerations (as indicated by the Test Level to which the device was tested), redirection capabilities, anchorage and back-up structure requirements, and debris produced by impact. All of the systems described in the Roadside Design Guide as meeting MASH or NCHRP Report 350, TL-3 evaluation criteria have the capability to stop compact cars and pickup trucks impacting head-on at 100 km/h [62 mph] within tolerable deceleration levels, and to redirect or contain those vehicles impacting on the sides of the units within the system's length-of-need. However, the costs of initial installation and maintenance, the ease of repair, and the system's durability (to environmental conditions and impacts) vary greatly. In addition, the contract plans need to include enough details showing the type of system desired, the hazard needing protection, and/or how the specifying agency intends to have the device attached to the hazard.Attenuators that are categorized as self-restoring or low maintenance are premium systems that are designed for high traffic areas where impacts can be expected to be frequent. The high initial cost can be offset by the long-term savings in maintenance and repair costs.Traffic speeds, geometric constraints, weaving maneuvers, congestion, worker exposure, space available to repair, potential for secondary impacts, and sight distance are just a few of the factors that should be considered at potential locations for redirective crash cushions. They have demonstrated the ability to redirect vehicles away from the corner of the hazard, as well as safely decelerate vehicles hitting the nose of the attenuator head-on.Sand barrel arrays are most appropriate for hazards that are located well off of the traveled way where impacts are expected to be infrequent, yet very serious when they do occur. The relatively low initial cost of these sacrificial crash cushions is a good investment to prevent serious injury when a crash does occur.WHAT IF MY STATE CHALLENGES ALL OR PART OF THE ROADSIDE DESIGN GUIDE?A. The Roadside Design Guide is neither a standard nor a design policy. It is intended to be used as a resource document offering guidance from which individual highway agencies can develop standards and policies. Although much of the material in the Guide can be considered universal in its application, several recommendations are subjective in nature and may need modification to fit local conditions.IS IT APPROPRIATE TO USE RE-GALVANIZED OR SALVAGED GUARDRAIL POSTS AND RAIL IN LONGITUDINAL BARRIERS FOR NEW CONSTRUCTION AND/OR MAINTENANCE REPAIR PROJECTS?A. No, only new posts and rails that are accompanied by a material certification should be allowed on Federal-Aid projects or on NHS routes. FHWA also recommends that State DOTs should not use salvaged or reconditioned guardrail material on State projects off the NHS because w-beam guardrails are at performance limits when all the materials used conform to specifications. Non-documented components should not be used.New steel guardrail posts should conform to AASHTO M270 / ASTM A-36 steel and AASHTO M111 / ASTM A-123 for the galvanizing. New W-beam rails should conform to AASHTO M-180 specifications. When delivered to construction sites, these components are typically accompanied by mill certifications. Salvaged material is often an assortment of varying ages, bolt-hole locations, steel grades, etc. State highway agency should be able to track and verify the source of these materials to ensure the barrier will perform as designed because it is difficult to establish that salvaged guardrail material meets proper specifications. The use of new material is recommended.An exception exists where "remove and reset" conditions apply. If the highway agency approves the condition of the in-situ barrier components, then it may be adjusted to current specifications within the limits of the project.Concerns about the environmental aspects of old guardrails may be reduced because most salvaged posts and rails are recycled and used to produce new steel. FHWA's general guidance on salvage credit is located at: Contract Administration Core Curriculum Manual 2014IS IT APPROPRIATE TO USE RE-STRAIGHTENED GUARDRAIL W-BEAM PANEL?A. No. W-beam rail is placed under significant tensile loading when the barrier is impacted. A minimum 27 ¾ inch high w-beam rail is at its performance limit when tested to the AASHTO Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) Test 3-31 using the quad cab pickup truck at 25 degrees and 100 km/hr. Any potential alteration of the strength of the rail by deformation during an impact or by restraightening could compromise its performance.Useful FHWA links:W-Beam Guardrail Repair GuideW-beam Guardrail Repair Guide - SafetyCriteria for Restoration of Longitudinal Barriershttp://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_656.pdfTask Force 13 Guide to Standardized Highway Barrier Rail Hardware:http://www.aashtotf13.org/Barrier-Hardware.phpHOW DO YOU HANDLE GUARDRAIL POSTS WHEN USING IN EXPANDED POLYSTYRENE (EPS) FILL, THE GEOFOAM, LIGHTWEIGHT FILL SINCE IT WON'T CREATE THE SUPPORT NEEDED FOR PROPER RESISTANCE OF THE GUARDRAIL WHEN HIT? CAN YOU SIMPLY EXTEND THE POSTS?A. There are a few ways to do this: 1) bury the EPS deep enough and cover with conventional soil that develops the length needed, 2) construct as a moment slab and barrier (similar to Mechanically Stabilized Earth walls), or 3) use a load distribution slab (a reinforced concrete slab overlying the EPS) an anchor the guardrail in it.WOULD DRILLING A NEW HOLE IN THE MIDWEST GUARDRAIL SYSTEM (MGS) GUARDRAIL WEAKEN THE SYSTEM?A. FHWA does not recommend altering a conventional w-beam rail by drilling new holes to accommodate the MGS. If the rail does not come with slots pre-punched at the 3' 1 &frac1/2;" mark, attempting to drill a new hole may compromise the performance of the rail or constrain its lateral movement. The cross section of all w-beam rail is already reduced at the splices, and there is a hole at the mid-span location. Providing additional factory-punched holes or slots at the 3' 1&frac1/2;" marks does not reduce the effective cross-section.ARE THERE OTHER PRODUCTS (W-BEAM GUARDRAIL SYSTEMS AND TERMINAL SECTIONS) CURRENTLY BEING TESTED?A. Yes, research sponsored by the NCHRP and pooled fund studies at the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (Lincoln, NE) and the Texas Transportation Institute (College Station, TX.) is underway. Placement next to slope break points, transitions, terminals, etc., will be tested and/or evaluated. Proprietary terminals are also being developed and tested under MASH criteria.HAVE TERMINAL SECTIONS FOR 31" W-BEAM GUARDRAIL BEEN FOUND ELIGIBLE WITHOUT BLOCKOUTS OR DO ALL SYSTEMS HAVE EITHER 8" OR 12" BLOCKOUTS? CAN THEY BE USED WITH SYSTEMS WITHOUT BLOCKOUTS?A. Currently eligible terminals for 31" guardrail were listed in Appendix C of our May 17, 2010 memo: Federal Highway Administration. Appropriate terminals are also listed in Chapter 8 of the RDG. Alternatively, a 27 or 27 ¾ inch terminal may be installed and transitioned to 29 inches or 31 inches when you reach 25 feet beyond the downstream end of the terminal. The terminal manufacturer should be consulted for current design details.MAY EXISTING ELIGIBLE NCHRP350 W-BEAM TERMINALS THAT WERE TESTED AT MINIMUM HEIGHT OF 27¾ INCHES BE INSTALLED AS PER EXISTING FHWA MEMORANDUM 'ACTION: ROADSIDE DESIGN: STEEL STRONG POST W-BEAM GUARDRAIL' DATED MAY 17, 2010?A.Yes. To clarify the existing guidance in the Memorandum dated May 17, 2010, it recommends strong post w-beam guardrail be installed at 29" +/- 1". This also applies to w-beam terminals that have been found crashworthy for strong-post w-beam guardrail at 27 to 27 ¾ inches. This has been FHWA recommendation for guardrail and the associated terminals for over 5 years. In addition, installing at a ragged-edge minimum of 27 ¾ inches provides no utility for the installer regarding installation tolerances.Prior acceptance / eligibility for strong post w-beam terminals does NOT apply to 31" tall w-beam systems like the Midwest Guardrail System (MGS). Terminals should be crash tested at 31" when used with these taller barriers which differ from strong post W-beam in other ways.Return to topTransitionsQ. ARE "LEAD ANCHORS" ACCEPTABLE WHEN CONNECTING THE GUARDRAIL END SHOE TO THE CONCRETE PARAPET OR END BLOCK?A. No. Lead anchors can work loose over time due to vibration from traffic. The only sure method of attachment is to continue the bolt through the concrete and place the nut on the outside of the structure. A good quality epoxy anchor is acceptable if properly installed according to the manufacturer's instructions.Return to topBridge RailingsQ. DO BRIDGE RAILINGS ON RECONSTRUCTED BRIDGES OFF THE NHS NEED TO MEET NCHRP REPORT 350 CRITERIA?In general, FHWA standards apply to projects on the NHS. State transportation agencies may establish different standards for non-NHS projects if desired and may elect to use roadside hardware that has not been successfully tested to NCHRP Report 350 guidelines. Nonetheless, the FHWA strongly recommends the use of crashworthy devices on all public facilities where run-off-the-road crashes may occur.Regarding the design of new railing standards for both "on and off" NHS routes, Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) Section 13 should apply to all new bridges and rehabilitated bridge projects where railing replacement is required. However, repair or retrofit to an existing railing system that has been found acceptable under the previous crash testing and eligibility criteria (such as NCHRP Report 230, the 1989 AASHTO Guide Specifications for Bridge Railings, or equivalent) does not require further testing to the NCHRP 350 requirements and are at the owner's discretion. Further support for this position can be referenced to the FHWA memorandum dated May 30, 1997. Please also be reminded that a new railing detail solely designed to the LRFD geometric and resistance requirements does not necessarily warrant "passing" of a full scale NCHRP 350 crash test at the specified performance level.Information on crashworthy bridge railings may be found on the Task Force 13 web site PAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE.FHWA is considering developing FAQs for the following topics:Barrier placement on traversable slopesGuardrail interaction with curbTransitions for height and shapeRetrofit barriers and upgrade optionsGuardrail post placement (and length) adjacent to slopesDynamic deflection issuesOther tolerance issuesPost spacingMax blockout widthMow StripsFoundations for concrete barriers, perm and tempLength of concrete barrier segmentsHardware placed on top of barriersBarrier delineationVehicle/Pedestrian barriers on bridgesInterchangeability of cable barrier postsSignificance of 'minor' installation details.Common repair scenarios of damaged barriers

I was in and out of mental hospitals trying to learn and manage my illness for the first ten years. Older, repeat patients told me to do everything I could to prevent coming back.I think the process is really about finding and knowing your own truth and that is what we all search for. However, these truths don't mean as much if we have to keep re-learning them.Sometimes, you go to the mental hospital to be reminded of and feel your truths. It can feel so good to be in a safe environment, away from your stressors, around like-minded individuals who are living their own truths and feeling emotions that have been denied for so long.Feeling and not building up emotions like shame, failure, anger etc. on the outside is hard because we have access to all our coping mechanisms, such as alcohol, spending, sex, food, drugs, etc. which can provide escape but not healing or growth.Going to the mental institution breaks you from these and lets the emotions pore out. After you release them, you finally realize reality is not that bad and get better.The cycle continues until you learn to really manage your stress, take breaks from your stressors, use healthier coping mechanisms, embrace the variety of tools that can change brain chemistry and release emotion more effectively.Going to the mental institution can become an addiction like everything else, but the drugs they use like Haldol, can really damage the brain. Over time, your symptoms worsen, become more frequent, you do not respond or recover as quickly. There is a price and your health suffers.You need to try to limit these extremes to protect brain functioning. They don't like you to know how frequent or long-term exposure to anti-psychotics harms the brain. But if you are out-of-control or not functioning in reality, they do not have many options. Everyone knows the sentence: you would be a danger to others or yourself.I think the point is if you have been a danger, you could be again. Be diligent. Don't give up, on yourself or someone who is mentally ill. We all have some form of mental illness, to some degree, or at some time. There will always be someone who makes you feel normal or more normal than them. But we all have something we can contribute and can tame our own demons. There are success stories and you can be one of them.Stay out of the hospital, stay healthy, remove yourself from toxic people, even if they are family, try everything the doctors suggest, see if and which meds work for you. You can use the more dangerous ones as responsible as you can. I use an antipsychotic as needed for times of high stress but I am aware of the damage I am causing my body. Another drug my psych doc perscribes works great for me but is going to cause kidney failure eventually. But I know this and have accepted it. My mind is much better on it, and so I know what the price is. I have learned my disease, how and why my symptoms increase and how to de escalate them.These are my truths from someone who has mental illness to you.I am diagnosed clinically with shizoaffective disorder. My grandfather was shizophrenic. I manage well with an average of 6 year periods of symptom free existance around a week or 2 period of psychosis.My symptoms in those either 1 to 16 days of delusions go from bipolar symptoms to dissociative disorder before becoming full-blown schizophrenic symptoms unless I intervene. There is a genetic component, and biology that has some things you can not control and some you can. I have learned many techniques from locking myself in a room, to intense workouts and then falling asleep in showers, to any activity that allows for creativity to popping one tranquilizer or a doc-approved amount of 8 at a time, to checking myself into a hospital, or asking a friend to come take care of me for a day or two at home.Sometimes, I have just decided to stop thinking delusionally and can “snap myself out of it.” Sometimes it was a matter of will power to curb delusional thought and sometimes I am so far out of touch that I had to be forcefully restrained or removed from society. The thing is for me, 2 weeks every six years is pretty manageable. But I also know others who don't fair as well.The key for myself is that I have set up a good support system and I try to love myself as best I can. I can report that I am happy and productive and have an overall good life. I feel successful, am thought of as successful by society and that all my dreams are coming or have come true.My mental condition has not limited me, though it has challenged me. On a positive note, it has often even provided me with some divergent thinking that has been essential to who I am.As I have aged, I have come to believe that I have a dysfunctional brain, but there are some advantages at times from the disfunction. I can act very well in a high-stress environment for a limited time. I can think calmly and quickly and can analyze more information at a faster rate when stressed. I also can be more sensitive to subtle factors in reading the environment and from other people. I have had many experiences of accurate premonition and can connect on a unconscious level to people I focus on and many can attest to this. I am often able to see solutions that others can't and connections others don't.Also, I have some pretty strong academic abilities, scoring over 100% in advanced academic college classes, such as anatomy/physiology, etc. and broke my college’s record for most amount of classes taken during a semester. I had to get special permission and scored all A's. Also, people are often impressed by my creative achievements.I tell you this, to let you know that there are gifted, well-rounded individuals who also have this disease and work diligently on daily emotional processing, thought monitoring and disease management, but most others DO NOT KNOW of their illness. This effort can also become so practiced that for the majority of your life, you can devote your time and energy to pursue a “normal life.” For me, I have been able to have a life with children, a successful marriage, career and stability for 98% of my days.This is despite having completely abnormal mental functioning. On what some would say a “metaphysical” level, I am able to allow my body to be controlled by other forces. This feels like a supernatural force that can take over your body. I also have a different experience with time. I am able to jump ahead consciously to periods of time in the future and have no memory of getting to these next moments, if desired. These last two behaviors are ones I do not do any longer for obvious reasons of self-harm.While it can be argued I am not really doing this but only thinking I am doing this, the fact remains, that I can feel this. Meaning, I can FEEL an autopilot switch turned on and the autopilot is way better than I am. I can do this at anytime even when symptom free but it takes more mental effort to stop than start. I have learned to FEEL and cultivate the experience of choice during these experiences. This means that I have some power that I can exercise when my senses start changing. Over time, I have learned to strengthen this ability to start or stop symptoms and is mostly started when I became open to the possibility.Belief in the power of your mind is just one small part and especially in the beginning I needed lots of professional help and support from family in order to really provide stability to my brain chemistry.Another mental concept is consciousness and how we interpret time. I can feel the experience of simply becoming conscious at a different moment, meaning I can turn off my brain, but still get myself to another point in life. This is like functioning with witnessing the autopilot or choosing to completely hand my life over and not even witness it until I decide to “turn on again.”It is kind of like your life is a tape and you just say, stop, fast forward, stop and then play again.I tell you this to understand the appeal of the delusional mind, the appeal of psychosis and how it can become an addiction of sorts to not feel, or cope. The more you embrace non-reality, the more you stay in it and the harder it gets to come back to the real.For example, there have been times in my past where I just no longer wished to experience what I was experiencing. Maybe I was going thru something where I felt my safety threatened or maybe I just didnt want to experience boredom.When stressed, I have had visual hallucinations that changed my life for the better because they gave me the strength to do what was best. Seeing a glimpse of what could be the future and knowing with absolute certainty it is a truth is extremely motivating. I have also been able to hear in auditory hallucinations, words from loved ones or felt feelings from them that helped me know the truth.Even to this day, if I really want to open myself up to others, I can concentrate in the dark and hear their input on my life, what they are thinking, especially with regards to me and how they are feeling. These are auditory hallucinations, because for me, I really hear their voice.I try not to do this because it can open yourself up to too much of their emotions. Besides being more self-conscious and insecure, you can become consumed with fear, paranoia, worst-case scenerios. Emotions are not just the good ones, such as peace and love and navigating the gamut is no joke. But, even with my boundaries up, if their pain is strong enough, I will feel it, and this has helped me understand why they do what they do the next day or later.Additionally, the pull to “broaden your senses" where at times when I didn't know what the right thing to do was and decided to sink into my auto guidance and just follow the wonderful things it did. It was great at the time because I did some amazing things and could just skip some rougher times.From a survival standpoint, one could see the advantage. Stuck in prison, better to go insane. I, personally, have lived in padded rooms, confined in restraints, lived without a window for what I believed could be forever. I have woken up on concrete, with no clothes (safety risk) with only a drain to stare at for hours upon hours.Sadly, staring at drains, or waking up to the view of a drain as I have either passed out, fallen asleep or finally woken up to reality on a cold concrete or tile floor has become something familiar to me. And instead of sparking fear can spark comfort as it means I am alive and in a safe place I can recover. The only worrisome issue is how bad of shape my physical body is in and what permament damage I have to the body and mind I actually really love.Of course, this is just one of the extremely serious risks of delusional thought that are too numerous to even list. There were times, in the heat of psychosis that people thought I was trying to kill myself when in my mind I thought I was elevating my existance to another level. Death, naturally, is a legitimate concern as the flame burns quick with often devastating consequences. Many schizoaffectives over history have died from just complete exhaustion, of pushing themselves too hard during moments of delusion or mania. Some have been the greatest inventors, and charismatic leaders of their time.You can really push yourself to the extreme with some extraordinary results and awareness and more commonly some devastating impacts to loved ones, jobs, or worse, society.Here is a mild example. Once, while psychotic in a mental hospital, I really wanted to understand the emotional effects of food on a most basic level. In order to start at the beginning of how my body and mind truly felt and were effected by different food I survived first on air, then water, then days on 3 of those tiny Half and Half little tubs, before adding slowly, a little jam packet to feel the effects of sugar vs. dairy.You get the picture, until I finally graduated to real pieces of substance in forms of protein, starch, and essential vitamins. You can see how eye-opening this experience could be and also how dangerous. And also how some might think you have an eating disorder when really you normally love food and always maintain a healthy weight and muscle mass.Less mild examples of being able to push your body include escaping handcuffs, a straitjacket, needing four police officers to restrain me, and breaking thru hospital locked doors.When psychotic, I have learned so much about my abilities and personality. I love singing, dancing, tedious activities, design, nearly all sports, and have a huge need for physical exertion. I have learned this from what I do in mental hospitals. I have cleaned every inch of floor in a wing on my hands and knees with a sock and spit. I have “rock climbed” up windows. I have made an entire outfit, including shoes, out of toilet paper. I have made a sculptural painting on a mirror out of peanut paper. I have learned exactly how tight I like to be restrained with the right amount of pain, without leaving marks on my body. I have realized how nice it can feel to be really tightly but not too painfully restrained because you can fight and fight, as long and hard as you want without hurting anyone. Except yourself. And sometimes you just want to fight yourself because you are so angry and have only you to blame.I have since learned there are more productive ways to do things similar, but outside of the hospital.Learning to live in the now, in a shared reality, feeling the pain of life is definitely a process. Ultimately, I think we all just want to connect. For me, discipline, healthy choices, including healthy thought, and emotional stability all conflict with mental illness.It is a life-long ilness, but so can any addiction, as it becomes a pattern of the mind and body. But it can be retrained, accomodations can be made, and accepted.We all have our limitations and dysfunction. It is what it is. I love my mind and would not change it. I try to keep it functioning every day as best I can. Stress, diet, poor choices, too much adrenaline, repetitive thoughts, worrying, inconsistant sleep schedule, unsafe environments, unresolved trama, lack of support system, toxic relationships, hallucinogens and hormonal changes all accaserbate the illness.Finally, if you really want to find out what it like to have my disorder, I wrote my account of what happens when I experience stress. For shizoaffectives, stress often causes psychotic episodes or breaks from reality. This is where the mind begins to fall apart.Let me tell you about it, how it happens and what it feels like. This is one of the primary parts to this diagnosis. And this is a mild experience.Once, I had my husband just drive me around in my van, never really stopping, because I felt stressed just being out in the world. So, I just had him take time off and drive back and forth between different locations to help clear my mind.Just feeling the car moving and being in its protective little bubble, with him, was relaxing enough. What really helped me feel better was when he went on the freeway and I could feel the speed of the car under me. I felt safe, like I was being taken far away from my troubles by someone I love.Truthfully, though I just needed to feel like I was going far away from my location of stress, I also wanted to get away from the sounds that come with staying in one location. And specifically, I wanted to take a break from the emotional energies of residential areas. This was because I was having specific problems associated with houses.I will try to explain this better in a way that is more understandable. You know when you are in an apartment and you can feel energies of those living around you? I mean you know the sound of the voices even though you can’t really make out what they are saying? You sense emotions in sound through the walls or in the common hallway, even if the sound is heard only for a second.This is kind of what I am talking about, except on a VERY small and completely normal level. But when you are a stressed schizophrenic, it is a whole different story and it is anything but normal.That's because for the average person, these things are very subtle. They are simply part of your environment that sometimes you pick up on and sometimes you don’t, often depending on your own emotional state. Now for a schizophrenic, or SCHIZOAFFECTIVE who is experiencing their schizophrenic symptoms, their stressed emotional state heightens all their senses. Imagine having a dial of emotional awareness and you crank that sucker up.All this talk doesn’t mean that much though, so it is better for me to just describe a day for a very STRESSED schizoaffective and I hope that will help you understand the benefits of stress, the downsides, and how you can use it to harness your most powerful self.That is why I will describe the 24 hours leading up to my husband driving me around. I will explain how the best part of stress is that it allows you to do some great stuff.But I will let you be the judge of that.If the following story is too hard for you to read, please stop. I warn you. I write very descriptively and I will not spare you the intensity of my experience. Just know, it is much harder to experience this in real life than to read about it.So here is what I did all in a day. Basically, I had a conversation with my mom, my landlord, a biker gang, a construction worker called the police, and talked to two neighbors. It doesn’t sound too stressful right? Tell me about it.It began with my mom. While visiting her house, I notice her neighbor’s house has all these strange, beat up cars in front of it. This is an expensive neighborhood, so it is completely out of place. I ask her about it and she says, her neighbor foreclosed on his house. It is coming up for auction soon, but he says his keys were stolen from a worker he has. So thats why there are all these strangers living in it now.I question the news. I tell her that her neighbor is pretty shady. “You can't believe anything he says,” I say.I go into the backyard and look into their backyard. When I finally see someone, I wave them over. I ask her who she is, why she is there and where my neighbor is. She immediately acts weird. She doesn't answer my questions. She keeps telling me “Don't worry about the noise. We are just celebrating. My grandma is dying and we are just so happy we get to take care of her in such a nice house.”“But what about my neighbor?” I say. “Where is he?”Finally, she stops talking about all the loud praying and chanting noises I may hear and stops pleading her case for me not to worry about noises at night. I did not even ask her a question like this.Finally, she tells me they rented this home for 6 months.By now, somehow the neighborhood has all come to their back yards to chime in. “That's not true!” I hear. “Thats a lie."I look at her and tell her there is an auction date online in 2 weeks. She said “That's not true. They have six months.”I respond, “Well. You won't mind if I call the police to clear things up. I mean he could be dead for all I know.”Honestly, he was a shady kind of guy. It wasn't impossible. Everytime I talked to him, it felt like I was coated in lies afterward.So I go inside to call an officer over and my worst case scenario brain is hoping he isn't tied up inside or something. Not very likely, but nothing seems right about any of this.In the meantime, my undiagnosed bipolar mother stars freaking out. She starts rushing thru all the previous events that she didn’t feel the need to tell me earlier. Now things are finally starting to make sense.I begin to see terror grow in her eyes. I guess the other neighbor on the other side has been super stressed. He is a lawyer but he won't do anything because he has a disabled and vulnerable wife inside his house. Everyone hears these “loud noises” at night, at all hours, and they can't figure out if its a party or cult or what.Ugh.So, I start dialing the police and when my mom sees what I am doing she starts screaming out things like she fears retaliation and other such craziness. I look at her like she has gone insane and continue on with the call.Whatever.The officer comes and he is super nice. I tell him, “Look. I don't know what's going on. I don't know where my neighbor is. There are all these people I have never seen at the house next door. I tried talking to someone and she says she can live there for six months. But online is says it's going up for auction in 2 weeks. I don't know. It could be my neighbor scammed these people or he could be in trouble.”I end with. “Honestly. I just don’t know. He is pretty shady.”By this point my mom has locked herself in her room and is brewing up a full-blown emotional frenzy. I try not to listen to her as I hear HER call 911 about how “her daughter is about to start some confrontation with her neighbors and she fears for her safety” and all this other stuff.I block her out, because at the moment, I am too concerned for the officer who is thankfully a super muscled out, huge, black dude that I immediately feel like I want to protect somehow. He takes one look at the seven or eight super junky, kinda tricked out cars all parked halfhazzardly around a nearly million dollar home and frowns.I ask, “Maybe I should go with you?” and then realize no, it is probably best if I wait by the cars.So I watch him go up and ring the doorbell and the women comes to the door. You can’t see anyone else inside, though I know there are lots of men inside because I could hear them or feel them, I don't know which, when I was in the backyard.After a few minutes the officer comes back and starts taking down numbers from each car's license plates. He goes back to his vehicle. I am trying to figure out if is he is calling for backup or just running plates and by this time, I get this feeling like everyone in the neighborhood is listening. It is WAY too quiet.After about 6-10 minutes or so the women is rushing back out with a paper. One piece of just regular computer paper. The cop is reading it, he hands it to me. I look at it. It has my neighbor’s correct name. It is typed, and not handwritten and it says it he agreed to rent until a date two weeks from now. I yell out for the whole neighborhood to hear, “It says you are supposed to be out in weeks!”The cop says more quietly but firmly, “You need to be out in two weeks."The women starts screaming, “How can you start looking at our vehicles. This is discrimination!” And the cop says, “No, how would you feel if a bunch of people you didn't know came into your neighborhood and you didn't know what was going on.” As we both were walking back nextdoor, trying to get away from the fury this woman was starting to build.”As we come back, my mom comes rushing out, asking what's going on and the officer explains calmly to her that they will be there for two weeks and will be out by the auction date.He looks at me and says, “It’s good it went that way.” and I say, “Yeah, either that or it's the best scam EVER.”Our eyes lock as I see us both processing how easy it would be to just look up homes online going for auction and typing up a rental agreement note with your victim’s name on it.“Do you think so?” he asks me.“I don't know.” I respond seriously. “But they will be out in 2 weeks.After he left, my mom was still freaked out. I told her she could come stay with me. She was still mad but I exclaimed, “Mom. I have made you as safe as I can make you! We have all their license plate information.”“Oh.” She stops her ranting. “He ran their plates?”“Yes,” I say with an eye roll in exasperation at how difficult she made the situation.Well, that was the first hours of my day. It only gets more stressful.To take a breather from my story. Stress allows you to stay calm. It is great to use if you need to protect something or someone. It gives you courage. To fight for loved ones, a stranger. To protect your home, your neighborhood, your county, your world. It can collectively band you with others, give you common purpose, and help you complete a mission. It helps you think, increases reaction time, assess more information. It allows you to hone your senses to a very powerful point.But that point can only be used for so long. Still, it's amazing how far the body can go, all the way to the breaking point.My breaking point was still a ways off, though my stress would only keep escalating.To continue…As soon as I made it home. Literally, I get out of my car and my landlord rushes up to me.She has put up “No trespassing” signs on the duplex diagonal from me. Our backyards have half a divider separating them.“I don't want you to worry,” she begins.OMG. She has the same terror look as my mother! I look at her with horror, but she is picking up steam.She continues. “But the unit across from you. I don't know who is living there. I have no idea who they are. They are not supposed to be there. I put up signs.” She keeps going, unloading all this info on me about how she keeps trying to get them, they only come at night, the sheriff won’t come for so many days. Finally, she gets to her main point.“If you see them. Please, please call me. I will rush here and get them out!”You have got to be kidding me. I have a young son living a few steps away and you have no record of who is living there, I am thinking.Omg. And here I told my mom to come here!“Fine.” I tell her.“Thank You, thank You.” She is croveling now. “I am sooo sorry I had to tell you. There is only one other thing.”My jaw dropped. Really. Another.He is on the other apartment, on the back side,” she speeds out.I stop her there, with eyes widening. But the pause is broad as she continues to explain that there is just one other guy that is not supposed to be there. That is living there when he is not supposed to.Well, fast forward a little, I then find myself yelling at a girl in her early twenties, a girl who came later out of that unit and passed outside my back yard. I called my landlord on the phone and shoved it over to the girl's face and screamed, “You talk to Carol right now. She says she can't get ahold of you for months, and she is on the phone right now!”The girl talked to Carol and gave the phone back to me and Carol says, “She is going to get her father to help her pack her things and they will be out by tonight.”Whatever. I am now super pissed off. I feel used by both of these two weak, terrified women who can't hold themselves together or so I am thinking at the time.I am so mad.I leave my home to go get some food and I see a guy I have seen at the library before. He is younger, in his twenties, and has a construction hat and back pack. But he has a bedroll too. I figure he is homeless, but he is trying so hard to look put together. He clearly is working. He is trying so hard to stay in the right places that are open and not draw attention.I start to feel guilt. I feel bad. I thought about all the people I interacted with today who were desperate for a place to live in. And here was someone with no place at all.I looked again and I saw a young man who reminded me of my husband. Someone trying to be independent, trying to do the right thing. Suffering but knowing every day he was working towards something. Those type of guys need a break every once in a while.I went and picked up pizza and a 2 liter. On my way back, I pulled up to him and motioned him to the window. “Hi” I said. “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but do you have a place to stay tonight?”His eyes lit up. I saw a spark of hope. “No,” he said.“Well, I don't have a place you can stay, but if you want I will let you sleep in this van tonight,” I said. He immediately told me he thought he was going to have to camp in the woods tonight and was so happy he didn't have to and how he was here for a job and would be going back tomorrow.I told him the arrangement would only be for tonight and that he would be fine as long as he stayed in the van. You cannot see inside the windows and the seats were already folded into the compartments so it was flat and open for laying down.“But,” I warned. “You have to be VERY careful of the neighbors.”At this moment, I saw or felt paranoia. It was in him, and it reminded me of myself.I quickly continued. “It will be fine as long as you just stay in all night and quickly slip out in the morning. Everyone is on high alert right now with strangers being in the neighborhood and how safe they are in their homes, especially at night.”He said he understood and wouldn't even turn his phone light on. When I gave him a few slices of pizza and poured some soda in a to-go cup I had, he looked at me like a I had just given him $1,000.It broke my heart.That night, I can't sleep. Or I can but I am an emotional wreck. I have a stranger in my van and I am trying to process everything I've seen.Somehow, I end up going for a walk at 3am. I just rememert thinking I needed to get out. I needed to just wander around and as I wandered i could unwind my brain. I try to just let my body go where it needs to go. I practically close my eyes and walk. It doesn’t even matter if I use my eyes because not only is it pitch black outside, but I have my little toy poodle to act as a guide.I just let her lead me. She knows this neighborhood so well. She knows our regular routes. She is a scout, a patrol dog. She walks me and looks for danger. She patrols and protects the neighborhood. She makes me feel unified in our mission. She makes me feel I have a purpose in this stressful time.I completely zone out.I am so stressed that I don’t even notice I am walking with my eyes barely even open. Thinking back on it now, I might have even been like sleep walking in a way. I couldn’t sense, I could only feel. I could feel the need to wander and get lost. I remember getting to the point where I didn't even know where I was and was okay with that. I just kept walking in the dark, and it felt nice to just wander around in the dark.Then something got my attention. In the far off distance, some lights began to appear. The light was like a pull. I felt myself needing to go there. I needed to see this compulsion out.As i got closer and the lights grew bigger I sensed a lot of people. I heard little noises that grew more focused as I neared. It sounded like people trying to scuttle around in the dark. The nearer I got the more the event started to take shape. It was a party. And the people sounded like me. Someone said something like “I can never sleep at night.” And people were laughing and joking. And they sounded like they were having so much fun. The lights were getting bigger And I could start to see more. It was a fire. In a big metal barrel.Now I was starting to wake up and process what I was seeing. Yes, I finally knew where I was. I was at the abandoned house.During daylight, I had seen some old RVs and campers in the back. But I never saw people. Now I realize people must be living in them. I had seen a couple of motorcyles parked there once. And you always heard bikes roaring occasionally thru town. This must be where the local biker gang came to party.I listened. I felt. I was still feeling a little in a daze but i could feel a pull. Like a moth to a flame, I kept going forward. I heard voices that made me feel happy. It was so nice to feel happy. I wanted to rush in and embrace it and roll around in it. I wanted to feel abandon, where you had no care in the world.It was like finding water when you've be wandering around in a desert. It was a mentally ill person oasis. It felt like I was where I belonged.It would be so nice to be invited to a party like that. Maybe I could get invited, I thought. Maybe I could get an invite for me and my husband to come another night. He used to have a bike. He would love it if they were good people.Good people. That was the point. I needed to see if they were good.I heard some sexual talk and that's when I remembered. This abandoned house was across the street from a park. My son plays with a boy who lives next to the park. His house was directly across the street. Horror flashed across my brain. It's summer. The windows are all down. The boy and his brothers might hear this. I had a little bit more purpose now.I would get to the bottom of this. I approached the house and headed for the fire. I approached the guy who looked and acted like he was the bouncer of this “club.” He had presence, confidence and an aura of providing protection. If he liked me, everyone else would.“It sounds like you guys are having a party. I heard you and could see you from a mile away,” I smirked. Take that; there are kids in this neighborhood.I continued. “I came to check out what kind of people you are and whether this party is a party my husband would approve of.”“Oh yeah?” he said with a tone of approval that I knew meant he liked what had just walked to his door.“Yeah, is this the type of party a girl like me would feel safe in?” I asked.He quickly responded. “I tell you what, if you stick with me I will personally make sure …I…take care of you and make sure everyone will leave you alone. How does that sound?”“Not very appropriate considering I just told you I have a husband.” I countered quick.At this point, two of the sidekicks came running up to flank his sides.Before they could assess the situation a pit bull charged in from behind. My 8-pound dog lunged and the dog 10x her size, melted away to the background.“Who is this?” I heard. One was a lengthy smart guy who liked to talk fast and the other was like a Chris farley type, soft but probably used to taking a lot of jokes at his expense.I didn't like either but the one in the middle still had potential. I could see him still possibly being the type of guy my husband might like.But I focused on the mission.“Is this time and place normal for your parties?” I asked. Sweet but with steel. You have to step up when it's 3 on one.The fast guy then starts talking fast. I don't even really listen because it sounds like he's trying to sell me a car.“Because it kinda seems like you might be terrorizing the neighborhood. I am just concerned about what's APPROPRIATE you know. It’s a family neighborhood. Lots of kids around.”I pointed to the park behind me.At this point, it got weird.Confusion. “There's no park there,” said Middle, short for guy in the middle.It was pitch black to me but yes, I remembered the park right across the street from the abandoned house.“Right there.” I point again.“No.”“What! Wait. Are you sure?” I said starting to sound confused. Maybe I had gotten turned around in my quest to just get lost.This is when Middle slowly came closer. “Are you lost?” He said like he was talking to a suddenly innocent child instead of a woman he wanted to take care of a few moments ago.“Oh my god. Are you sleepwalking?” said Quick.“Here, let us help You!” They all we were coming towards me.Sensing danger I forced myself to open my eyes. They were shut. Oh my God, I didn't even know they were closed. I am so messed up right now, when I am seeing and not even seeing.I needed to get home fast.No!” I shouted and started backing away.“I'm fine! I just wanted to know the time and place for your parties.” I spat out as I turned on my heel, and gave them my backview.“Every Friday and Saturday night at ten!” I hear.“Thank you for the invite!” I respond.I tried not to run. I wanted to excude confidence to guarantee my escape.“I love how they walk,” Farley says.I exaggrate the movement even more and then once I had the required distance I felt I could out run someone, I ran as hard as I could.By the next morning, it was 24 hours since my stressful day started. I told my husband I let some guy sleep in the van. He ran out and checked. But he was already politely gone. I told him about my confrontation with the local biker gang and tried to plead my case that I was just so hung up on protecting the neighborhood and feeling so much fear from everyone locked in their homes at night.Seriously. The fear was just too much and I needed to get away. I needed to go where I felt the safest. Where was that? And then I remembered my paranoid friend and knew.And so I went and fell asleep in the van.Aftermath:I had always been worried about that abandoned house. After my night visitation, the gang moved on and i never saw bikes there again. In its place was a bunch of police tape stringing the entrance off.My husband had us moved out of this city in a week as we were month-to-month. He thought the city was too difficult for my sensitivities. The owner of our duplex sent the loveliest note saying what beautiful tenants we were. I kept it.

If you want to read my story in the next paragraphs, I have detailed many of the challenges I have faced as a result of my mental illness.I was in and out of mental hospitals trying to learn and manage my illness for the first ten years. Older, repeat patients told me to do everything I could to prevent coming back.I think the process is really about finding and knowing your own truth and that is what we all search for. However, these truths don't mean as much if we have to keep re-learning them.Sometimes, you go to the mental hospital to be reminded of and feel your truths. It can feel so good to be in a safe environment, away from your stressors, around like-minded individuals who are living their own truths and feeling emotions that have been denied for so long.Feeling and not building up emotions like shame, failure, anger etc. on the outside is hard because we have access to all our coping mechanisms, such as alcohol, spending, sex, food, drugs, etc. which can provide escape but not healing or growth.Going to the mental institution breaks you from these and lets the emotions pore out. After you release them, you finally realize reality is not that bad and get better.The cycle continues until you learn to really manage your stress, take breaks from your stressors, use healthier coping mechanisms, embrace the variety of tools that can change brain chemistry and release emotion more effectively.Going to the mental institution can become an addiction like everything else, but the drugs they use like Haldol, can really damage the brain. Over time, your symptoms worsen, become more frequent, you do not respond or recover as quickly. There is a price and your health suffers.You need to try to limit these extremes to protect brain functioning. They don't like you to know how frequent or long-term exposure to anti-psychotics harms the brain. But if you are out-of-control or not functioning in reality, they do not have many options. Everyone knows the sentence: you would be a danger to others or yourself.I think the point is if you have been a danger, you could be again. Be diligent. Don't give up, on yourself or someone who is mentally ill. We all have some form of mental illness, to some degree, or at some time. There will always be someone who makes you feel normal or more normal than them. But we all have something we can contribute and can tame our own demons. There are success stories and you can be one of them.Stay out of the hospital, stay healthy, remove yourself from toxic people, even if they are family, try everything the doctors suggest, see if and which meds work for you. You can use the more dangerous ones as responsible as you can. I use an antipsychotic as needed for times of high stress but I am aware of the damage I am causing my body. Another drug my psych doc perscribes works great for me but is going to cause kidney failure eventually. But I know this and have accepted it. My mind is much better on it, and so I know what the price is. I have learned my disease, how and why my symptoms increase and how to de-escalate them.These are my truths from someone who has mental illness to you.I am diagnosed clinically with shizoaffective disorder. My grandfather was shizophrenic. I manage well with an average of 6 year periods of symptom free existance around a week or 2 period of psychosis.Symptoms in those either 1 to 16 days of delusions go from bipolar symptoms to dissociative disorder before becoming full-blown schizophrenic symptoms unless I intervene. There is a genetic component, and biology that has some things you can not control and some you can. I have learned many techniques from locking myself in a room, to intense workouts and then falling asleep in showers, to any activity that allows for creativity to popping one tranquilizer or a doc-approved amount of 8 at a time, to checking myself into a hospital, or asking a friend to come take care of me for a day or two at home.Sometimes, I have just decided to stop thinking delusionally and can “snap myself out of it.” Sometimes it was a matter of will power to curb delusional thought and sometimes I am so far out of touch that I had to be forcefully restrained or removed from society.The thing is for me, 2 weeks every six years is pretty manageable. But I also know others who don't fair as well.The key for myself is that I have set up a good support system and I try to love myself as best I can. I can report that I am happy and productive and have an overall good life. I feel successful, am thought of as successful by society and that all my dreams are coming or have come true.My mental condition has not limited me, though it has challenged me. On a positive note, it has often even provided me with some divergent thinking that has been essential to who I am.As I have aged, I have come to believe that I have a dysfunctional brain, but there are some advantages at times from the disfunction. I can act very well in a high-stress environment for a limited time. I can think calmly and quickly and can analyze more information at a faster rate when stressed. I also can be more sensitive to subtle factors in reading the environment and from other people. I have had many experiences of accurate premonition and can connect on a unconscious level to people I focus on and many can attest to this. I am often able to see solutions that others can't and connections others don't.Also, I have some pretty strong academic abilities, scoring over 100% in advanced academic college classes, such as anatomy/physiology, etc. and broke my college’s record for most amount of classes taken during a semester. I had to get special permission and scored all A's. Also, people are often impressed by my creative achievements.I tell you this, to let you know that there are gifted, well-rounded individuals who also have this disease and work diligently on daily emotional processing, thought monitoring and disease management, but most others DO NOT KNOW of their illness. This effort can also become so practiced that for the majority of your life, you can devote your time and energy to pursue a “normal life.” For me, I have been able to have a life with children, a successful marriage, career and stability for 98% of my days.This is despite having completely abnormal mental functioning. On what some would say a “metaphysical” level, I am able to allow my body to be controlled by other forces. This feels like a supernatural force that can take over your body. I also have a different experience with time. I am able to jump ahead consciously to periods of time in the future and have no memory of getting to these next moments, if desired. These last two behaviors are ones I do not do any longer for obvious reasons of self-harm.While it can be argued I am not really doing this but only thinking I am doing this, the fact remains, that I can feel this. Meaning, I can FEEL an autopilot switch turned on and the autopilot is way better than I am. I can do this at anytime even when symptom free but it takes more mental effort to stop than start. I have learned to FEEL and cultivate the experience of choice during these experiences. This means that I have some power that I can exercise when my senses start changing. Over time, I have learned to strengthen this ability to start or stop symptoms and it mostly started when I became open to the possibility.Belief in the power of your mind is just one small part and especially in the beginning I needed lots of professional help and support from family in order to really provide stability to my brain chemistry.Another mental concept is consciousness and how we interpret time. I can feel the experience of simply becoming conscious at a different moment, meaning I can turn off my brain, but still get myself to another point in life. This is like functioning with witnessing the autopilot or choosing to completely hand my life over and not even witness it until I decide to “turn on again.”It is kind of like your life is a tape and you just say, stop, fast forward, stop and then play again.I elaborate on this to help you understand the appeal of the delusional mind, the appeal of psychosis and how it can become an addiction of sorts to not feel, or cope. The more you embrace non-reality, the more you stay in it and the harder it gets to come back to the real.For example, there have been times in my past where I just no longer wished to experience what I was experiencing. Maybe I was going thru something where I felt my safety threatened or maybe I just didnt want to experience boredom.When stressed, I have had visual hallucinations that changed my life for the better because they gave me the strength to do what was best. Seeing a glimpse of what could be the future and knowing with absolute certainty it is a truth is extremely motivating. I have also been able to hear in auditory hallucinations, words from loved ones or felt feelings from them that helped me know the truth.Even to this day, if I really want to open myself up to others, I can concentrate in the dark and hear their input on my life, what they are thinking, especially with regards to me and how they are feeling. These are auditory hallucinations, because for me, I really hear their voice.I try not to do this because it can open yourself up to too much of their emotions. Beside becoming more self conscious and insecure, you can become consumed with fear, paranoia, worst-case scenerios. Emotions are not just the good ones, such as peace and love and navigating the gamut is no joke. But, even with my boundaries up, if their pain is strong enough, I will feel it, and this has helped me understand why they do what they do the next day or later.Additionally, the pull to “broaden your senses" came at times when I didn't know what the right thing to do was and decided to sink into my auto guidance and just follow the wonderful things it did. It was great at the time because I did some amazing things and could just skip some rougher times.From a survival standpoint, one could see the advantage. Stuck in prison, better to go insane. I, personally, have lived in padded rooms, confined in restraints, lived without a window for what I believed could be forever. I have woken up on concrete, with no clothes (safety risk) with only a drain to stare at for hours upon hours.Sadly, staring at drains, or waking up to the view of a drain as I have either passed out, fallen asleep or finally woken up to reality on a cold concrete or tile floor has become something familiar to me. And instead of sparking fear can spark comfort as it means I am alive and in a safe place I can recover. The only worrisome issue is how bad of shape my physical body is in and what permament damage I have to the body and mind I actually really love.Of course, this is just one of the extremely serious risks of delusional thought that are too numerous to even list. There were times, in the heat of psychosis that people thought I was trying to kill myself when in my mind I thought I was elevating my existance to another level. Death, naturally, is a legitimate concern as the flame burns quick with often devastating consequences.Many schizoaffectives over history have died from just complete exhaustion, of pushing themselves too hard during moments of delusion or mania. Some have been the greatest inventors, and charismatic leaders of their time. You can really push yourself to the extreme with some extraordinary results and awareness and more commonly some devastating impacts to loved ones, jobs, or worse, society.Here is a mild example. Once, while psychotic in a mental hospital, I really wanted to understand the emotional effects of food on a most basic level. In order to start at the beginning of how my body and mind truly felt and were effected by different food I survived first on air, then water, then days on 3 of those tiny Half and Half little tubs, before adding slowly, a little jam packet to feel the effects of sugar vs. dairy.You get the picture, until I finally graduated to real pieces of substance in forms of protein, starch, and essential vitamins. You can see how eye-opening this experience could be and also how dangerous. And also how some might think you have an eating disorder when really you normally love food and always maintain a healthy weight and muscle mass.Less mild examples of being able to push your body include escaping handcuffs, a straitjacket, needing four police officers to restrain me, and breaking thru hospital locked doors.When psychotic, I have learned so much about my abilities and personality. I love singing, dancing, tedious activities, design, nearly all sports, and have a huge need for physical exertion. I have learned this from what I do in mental hospitals. I have cleaned every inch of floor in a wing on my hands and knees with a sock and spit. I have “rock climbed” up windows. I have made an entire outfit, including shoes, out of toilet paper. I have made a sculptural painting on a mirror out of peanut paper. I have learned exactly how tight I like to be restrained with the right amount of pain, without leaving marks on my body. I have realized how nice it can feel to be really tightly but not too painfully restrained because you can fight and fight, as long and hard as you want without hurting anyone. Except yourself. And sometimes you just want to fight yourself because you are so angry and have only you to blame.I have since learned there are more productive ways to do things similar, but outside of the hospital.Learning to live in the now, in a shared reality, feeling the pain of life is definitely a process. Ultimately, I think we all just want to connect. For me, discipline, healthy choices, including healthy thought, and emotional stability all conflict with mental ilness. It is a life-long ilness, but so can any addiction, as it becomes a pattern of the mind and body. But it can be retrained, accomodations can be made, and accepted.We all have our limitations and dysfunction. It is what it is. I love my mind and would not change it. I try to keep it functioning every day as best I can. Stress, diet, poor choices, too much adrenaline, repetitive thoughts, worrying, inconsistant sleep schedule, unsafe environments, unresolved trama, lack of support system, toxic relationships, hallucinogens and hormonal changes all accaserbate the illness.To learn more about what I suggest for those who are struggling with self harm and learning new coping strategies, read on.Everyone self harms. Its completely normal. Alcohol destroys your liver. Soda destroys your teeth. Obesity destroys your insulin cells. Cigarettes destroy your lungs. Video games destroy your attention span. Shopping destroys your checking account. I could go on and on.The thing is whether the risk, long-term or short-term is worth the immediate pleasure. Finding the healthiest activity that can still soothe the need is ideal.For example, if you have learned to feel pleasure or emotional release from physical pain, boxing or MMA fighting might be more productive than say, sitting alone cutting your skin.There are so many different examples, you just have to find what works for you and get creative. I am sure you can find something that though there is risk of harm, could also provide you with opportunities, passion and a deeper connection with others.But know, that anything you chose could be done destructively, if done too hard, too often or too frequent. For example, you can exercise too much and ruin your joints or have an unhealthy fat percentage where your body starts eating your muscles for energy.Or take something else universally deemed “healthy,” such as meditation. You can start spending so much time trying to live in that moment of a completely clear mind, that you lose hours of time you could actually be producing something or strengthning your relationship with someone else.I would worry less about not self harming and focus more on embracing the emotion rather than coping. Coping, means you are just trying to get by. The point is to release the pain, not dull it just to make it to Day 2.Your goal as an individual is to figure out you. This means not coping but suffering. You learn who you are when you suffer. You feel the pain and survive. The more you cope, the less feeling you actually do.What do you do when you truly feel the pain, failure, shame, despair, loss, helplessness, loneliness? You live it, you feel it in everyway possible in an environment where others help protect you from danger, until you finally realize, they kept you alive and you chose to live.You do not need to cope all the time. Sometimes, you have to just cope temporarily until you get to a safe place. Go to your safe place. Remove obvious tools of self harm, but if you really wanted to smash your own head against a wall you could right? Ask a friend to restrain you so you can just lash out without abandon. Ask a friend to just sit with you while you cry and scream obsenities. Or just do by yourself. Sit, close your eyes and tap into the pain. Stay there and dwell in it. Feel what it feels like to not be able to breathe or move and sink further into the emotion until you really know it. Check yourself into a hotel room and ask room service to bring you food in a few hours to check on you or get a wakeup call at 3am to make sure you’re “awake.”You figure out your own safe place. Cultivate your own support system to HELP you experience emotion and limit risk. You don’t have to do this alone. Everyone is different. I could give you tons of suggestions on coping. Plunge your head in ice water, put hot blankets on, get a massage, or give yourself an orgasm. Sometimes, I have run a hot bath and just blown bubbles under the water to focus on my breathing. But the truth is, you will just be creating another habit. In order to live LESS mindlessly, less stuck in just your previous mental auto patterns, you have to just live and experience the ups and downs of life. It is easier to do this when you believe in yourself, know your capabilities and have learned your own worth.You do this by suffering, because when you survive the worst pain you could imagine, you start believing in yourself, or a higher power who was there at your lowest point, and you find your worth. You are worthy simply because you were created and here and deemed worthy to be.As you get older and more comfortable with emotions, if you experience them rather than immediately coping, you will have less highs and lows and longer normal days. Most of the time, you are able to then feel less intense emotions and more participation in activities you choose.Life shouldn't be about lots of highs and lows. When you dwell in these areas of existance too long you truly experience self harm, damage to your brain. If you can learn to not fear the emotion you will gain mastery over it. You cannot do this without establishing a comfort level. This means, at a certain point, you have to let go of your coping mechanism.While you might not be ready to let go of your security blanket or perferred tool of self-harm yet, the rewards are a higher level of existance. You can graduate to your stronger self.How long it takes you to learn or change does not matter. What is of value, is that we are all able to change, learn and what seems like an impossible feat at the time is really possible for you. You are not the first and are not the last person, learning to live in the painful reality of life. It is the human condition. We are all in it together and we must help each other.Here is a detailed account the one of my psychotic episodes. I hope you can see how challenging life can actually be.I do end up in the hospital but it is not my norm. Sometimes I go and sometimes I don't. At my rate, if I live to be 60, I will be fortunate to only go there 8-10 times. That's a lot, though. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.Honestly, I NEVER want to go. I always want to try something else.Once, I had my husband just drive me around in my van, never really stopping, because I felt stressed just being out in the world. So, I just had him take time off and drive back and forth between different locations to help clear my mind.Just feeling the car moving and being in its protective little bubble, with him, was relaxing enough. What really helped me feel better was when he went on the freeway and I could feel the speed of the car under me. I felt safe, like I was being taken far away from my troubles by someone I love.Truthfully, though I just needed to feel like I was going far away from my location of stress, I also wanted to get away from the sounds that come with staying in one location. And specifically, I wanted to take a break from the emotional energies of residential areas. This was because I was having specific problems associated with houses.I will try to explain this better in a way that is more understandable. You know when you are in an apartment and you can feel energies of those living around you? I mean you know the sound of the voices even though you can’t really make out what they are saying? You sense emotions in sound through the walls or in the common hallway, even if the sound is heard only for a second.This is kind of what I am talking about, except on a VERY small and completely normal level. But when you are a stressed schizophrenic, it is a whole different story and it is anything but normal.That's because for the average person, these things are very subtle. They are simply part of your environment that sometimes you pick up on and sometimes you don’t, often depending on your own emotional state. Now for a schizophrenic, or SCHIZOAFFECTIVE who is experiencing their schizophrenic symptoms, their stressed emotional state heightens all their senses. Imagine having a dial of emotional awareness and you crank that sucker up.All this talk doesn’t mean that much though, so it is better for me to just describe a day for a very STRESSED schizoaffective and I hope that will help you understand the benefits of stress, the downsides, and how you can use it to harness your most powerful self.That is why I will describe the 24 hours leading up to my husband driving me around. I will explain how the best part of stress is that it allows you to do some great stuff.But I will let you be the judge of that.If the following story is too hard for you to read, please stop. I warn you. I write very descriptively and I will not spare you the intensity of my experience. Just know, it is much harder to experience this in real life than to read about it.So here is what I did all in a day. Basically, I had a conversation with my mom, my landlord, a biker gang, a construction worker called the police, and talked to two neighbors. It doesn’t sound too stressful right? Tell me about it.It began with my mom. While visiting her house, I notice her neighbor’s house has all these strange, beat up cars in front of it. This is an expensive neighborhood, so it is completely out of place. I ask her about it and she says, her neighbor foreclosed on his house. It is coming up for auction soon, but he says his keys were stolen from a worker he has. So thats why there are all these strangers living in it now.I question the news. I tell her that her neighbor is pretty shady. “You can't believe anything he says,” I say.I go into the backyard and look into their backyard. When I finally see someone, I wave them over. I ask her who she is, why she is there and where my neighbor is. She immediately acts weird. She doesn't answer my questions. She keeps telling me “Don't worry about the noise. We are just celebrating. My grandma is dying and we are just so happy we get to take care of her in such a nice house.”“But what about my neighbor?” I say. “Where is he?”Finally, she stops talking about all the loud praying and chanting noises I may hear and stops pleading her case for me not to worry about noises at night. I did not even ask her a question like this.Finally, she tells me they rented this home for 6 months.By now, somehow the neighborhood has all come to their back yards to chime in. “That's not true!” I hear. “Thats a lie."I look at her and tell her there is an auction date online in 2 weeks. She said “That's not true. They have six months.”I respond, “Well. You won't mind if I call the police to clear things up. I mean he could be dead for all I know.”Honestly, he was a shady kind of guy. It wasn't impossible. Everytime I talked to him, it felt like I was coated in lies afterward.So I go inside to call an officer over and my worst case scenario brain is hoping he isn't tied up inside or something. Not very likely, but nothing seems right about any of this.In the meantime, my undiagnosed bipolar mother stars freaking out. She starts rushing thru all the previous events that she didn’t feel the need to tell me earlier. Now things are finally starting to make sense.I begin to see terror grow in her eyes. I guess the other neighbor on the other side has been super stressed. He is a lawyer but he won't do anything because he has a disabled and vulnerable wife inside his house. Everyone hears these “loud noises” at night, at all hours, and they can't figure out if its a party or cult or what.Ugh.So, I start dialing the police and when my mom sees what I am doing she starts screaming out things like she fears retaliation and other such craziness. I look at her like she has gone insane and continue on with the call.Whatever.The officer comes and he is super nice. I tell him, “Look. I don't know what's going on. I don't know where my neighbor is. There are all these people I have never seen at the house next door. I tried talking to someone and she says she can live there for six months. But online is says it's going up for auction in 2 weeks. I don't know. It could be my neighbor scammed these people or he could be in trouble.”I end with. “Honestly. I just don’t know. He is pretty shady.”By this point my mom has locked herself in her room and is brewing up a full-blown emotional frenzy. I try not to listen to her as I hear HER call 911 about how “her daughter is about to start some confrontation with her neighbors and she fears for her safety” and all this other stuff.I block her out, because at the moment, I am too concerned for the officer who is thankfully a super muscled out, huge, black dude that I immediately feel like I want to protect somehow. He takes one look at the seven or eight super junky, kinda tricked out cars all parked halfhazzardly around a nearly million dollar home and frowns.I ask, “Maybe I should go with you?” and then realize no, it is probably best if I wait by the cars.So I watch him go up and ring the doorbell and the women comes to the door. You can’t see anyone else inside, though I know there are lots of men inside because I could hear them or feel them, I don't know which, when I was in the backyard.After a few minutes the officer comes back and starts taking down numbers from each car's license plates. He goes back to his vehicle. I am trying to figure out if is he is calling for backup or just running plates and by this time, I get this feeling like everyone in the neighborhood is listening. It is WAY too quiet.After about 6-10 minutes or so the women is rushing back out with a paper. One piece of just regular computer paper. The cop is reading it, he hands it to me. I look at it. It has my neighbor’s correct name. It is typed, and not handwritten and it says it he agreed to rent until a date two weeks from now. I yell out for the whole neighborhood to hear, “It says you are supposed to be out in weeks!”The cop says more quietly but firmly, “You need to be out in two weeks."The women starts screaming, “How can you start looking at our vehicles. This is discrimination!” And the cop says, “No, how would you feel if a bunch of people you didn't know came into your neighborhood and you didn't know what was going on.” As we both were walking back nextdoor, trying to get away from the fury this woman was starting to build.”As we come back, my mom comes rushing out, asking what's going on and the officer explains calmly to her that they will be there for two weeks and will be out by the auction date.He looks at me and says, “It’s good it went that way.” and I say, “Yeah, either that or it's the best scam EVER.”Our eyes lock as I see us both processing how easy it would be to just look up homes online going for auction and typing up a rental agreement note with your victim’s name on it.“Do you think so?” he asks me.“I don't know.” I respond seriously. “But they will be out in 2 weeks.After he left, my mom was still freaked out. I told her she could come stay with me. She was still mad but I exclaimed, “Mom. I have made you as safe as I can make you! We have all their license plate information.”“Oh.” She stops her ranting. “He ran their plates?”“Yes,” I say with an eye roll in exasperation at how difficult she made the situation.Well, that was the first hours of my day. It only gets more stressful.To take a breather from my story. Stress allows you to stay calm. It is great to use if you need to protect something or someone. It gives you courage. To fight for loved ones, a stranger. To protect your home, your neighborhood, your county, your world. It can collectively band you with others, give you common purpose, and help you complete a mission. It helps you think, increases reaction time, assess more information. It allows you to hone your senses to a very powerful point.But that point can only be used for so long. Still, it's amazing how far the body can go, all the way to the breaking point.My breaking point was still a ways off, though my stress would only keep escalating.To continue…As soon as I made it home. Literally, I get out of my car and my landlord rushes up to me.She has put up “No trespassing” signs on the duplex diagonal from me. Our backyards have half a divider separating them.“I don't want you to worry,” she begins.OMG. She has the same terror look as my mother! I look at her with horror, but she is picking up steam.She continues. “But the unit across from you. I don't know who is living there. I have no idea who they are. They are not supposed to be there. I put up signs.” She keeps going, unloading all this info on me about how she keeps trying to get them, they only come at night, the sheriff won’t come for so many days. Finally, she gets to her main point.“If you see them. Please, please call me. I will rush here and get them out!”You have got to be kidding me. I have a young son living a few steps away and you have no record of who is living there, I am thinking.Omg. And here I told my mom to come here!“Fine.” I tell her.“Thank You, thank You.” She is croveling now. “I am sooo sorry I had to tell you. There is only one other thing.”My jaw dropped. Really. Another.He is on the other apartment, on the back side,” she speeds out.I stop her there, with eyes widening. But the pause is broad as she continues to explain that there is just one other guy that is not supposed to be there. That is living there when he is not supposed to.Well, fast forward a little, I then find myself yelling at a girl in her early twenties, a girl who came later out of that unit and passed outside my back yard. I called my landlord on the phone and shoved it over to the girl's face and screamed, “You talk to Carol right now. She says she can't get ahold of you for months, and she is on the phone right now!”The girl talked to Carol and gave the phone back to me and Carol says, “She is going to get her father to help her pack her things and they will be out by tonight.”Whatever. I am now super pissed off. I feel used by both of these two weak, terrified women who can't hold themselves together or so I am thinking at the time.I am so mad.I leave my home to go get some food and I see a guy I have seen at the library before. He is younger, in his twenties, and has a construction hat and back pack. But he has a bedroll too. I figure he is homeless, but he is trying so hard to look put together. He clearly is working. He is trying so hard to stay in the right places that are open and not draw attention.I start to feel guilt. I feel bad. I thought about all the people I interacted with today who were desperate for a place to live in. And here was someone with no place at all.I looked again and I saw a young man who reminded me of my husband. Someone trying to be independent, trying to do the right thing. Suffering but knowing every day he was working towards something. Those type of guys need a break every once in a while.I went and picked up pizza and a 2 liter. On my way back, I pulled up to him and motioned him to the window. “Hi” I said. “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but do you have a place to stay tonight?”His eyes lit up. I saw a spark of hope. “No,” he said.“Well, I don't have a place you can stay, but if you want I will let you sleep in this van tonight,” I said. He immediately told me he thought he was going to have to camp in the woods tonight and was so happy he didn't have to and how he was here for a job and would be going back tomorrow.I told him the arrangement would only be for tonight and that he would be fine as long as he stayed in the van. You cannot see inside the windows and the seats were already folded into the compartments so it was flat and open for laying down.“But,” I warned. “You have to be VERY careful of the neighbors.”At this moment, I saw or felt paranoia. It was in him, and it reminded me of myself.I quickly continued. “It will be fine as long as you just stay in all night and quickly slip out in the morning. Everyone is on high alert right now with strangers being in the neighborhood and how safe they are in their homes, especially at night.”He said he understood and wouldn't even turn his phone light on. When I gave him a few slices of pizza and poured some soda in a to-go cup I had, he looked at me like a I had just given him $1,000.It broke my heart.That night, I can't sleep. Or I can but I am an emotional wreck. I have a stranger in my van and I am trying to process everything I've seen.Somehow, I end up going for a walk at 3am. I just rememert thinking I needed to get out. I needed to just wander around and as I wandered i could unwind my brain. I try to just let my body go where it needs to go. I practically close my eyes and walk. It doesn’t even matter if I use my eyes because not only is it pitch black outside, but I have my little toy poodle to act as a guide.I just let her lead me. She knows this neighborhood so well. She knows our regular routes. She is a scout, a patrol dog. She walks me and looks for danger. She patrols and protects the neighborhood. She makes me feel unified in our mission. She makes me feel I have a purpose in this stressful time.I completely zone out.I am so stressed that I don’t even notice I am walking with my eyes barely even open. Thinking back on it now, I might have even been like sleep walking in a way. I couldn’t sense, I could only feel. I could feel the need to wander and get lost. I remember getting to the point where I didn't even know where I was and was okay with that. I just kept walking in the dark, and it felt nice to just wander around in the dark.Then something got my attention. In the far off distance, some lights began to appear. The light was like a pull. I felt myself needing to go there. I needed to see this compulsion out.As i got closer and the lights grew bigger I sensed a lot of people. I heard little noises that grew more focused as I neared. It sounded like people trying to scuttle around in the dark. The nearer I got the more the event started to take shape. It was a party. And the people sounded like me. Someone said something like “I can never sleep at night.” And people were laughing and joking. And they sounded like they were having so much fun. The lights were getting bigger And I could start to see more. It was a fire. In a big metal barrel.Now I was starting to wake up and process what I was seeing. Yes, I finally knew where I was. I was at the abandoned house.During daylight, I had seen some old RVs and campers in the back. But I never saw people. Now I realize people must be living in them. I had seen a couple of motorcyles parked there once. And you always heard bikes roaring occasionally thru town. This must be where the local biker gang came to party.I listened. I felt. I was still feeling a little in a daze but i could feel a pull. Like a moth to a flame, I kept going forward. I heard voices that made me feel happy. It was so nice to feel happy. I wanted to rush in and embrace it and roll around in it. I wanted to feel abandon, where you had no care in the world.It was like finding water when you've be wandering around in a desert. It was a mentally ill person oasis. It felt like I was where I belonged.It would be so nice to be invited to a party like that. Maybe I could get invited, I thought. Maybe I could get an invite for me and my husband to come another night. He used to have a bike. He would love it if they were good people.Good people. That was the point. I needed to see if they were good.I heard some sexual talk and that's when I remembered. This abandoned house was across the street from a park. My son plays with a boy who lives next to the park. His house was directly across the street. Horror flashed across my brain. It's summer. The windows are all down. The boy and his brothers might hear this. I had a little bit more purpose now.I would get to the bottom of this. I approached the house and headed for the fire. I approached the guy who looked and acted like he was the bouncer of this “club.” He had presence, confidence and an aura of providing protection. If he liked me, everyone else would.“It sounds like you guys are having a party. I heard you and could see you from a mile away,” I smirked. Take that; there are kids in this neighborhood.I continued. “I came to check out what kind of people you are and whether this party is a party my husband would approve of.”“Oh yeah?” he said with a tone of approval that I knew meant he liked what had just walked to his door.“Yeah, is this the type of party a girl like me would feel safe in?” I asked.He quickly responded. “I tell you what, if you stick with me I will personally make sure …I…take care of you and make sure everyone will leave you alone. How does that sound?”“Not very appropriate considering I just told you I have a husband.” I countered quick.At this point, two of the sidekicks came running up to flank his sides.Before they could assess the situation a pit bull charged in from behind. My 8-pound dog lunged and the dog 10x her size, melted away to the background.“Who is this?” I heard. One was a lengthy smart guy who liked to talk fast and the other was like a Chris farley type, soft but probably used to taking a lot of jokes at his expense.I didn't like either but the one in the middle still had potential. I could see him still possibly being the type of guy my husband might like.But I focused on the mission.“Is this time and place normal for your parties?” I asked. Sweet but with steel. You have to step up when it's 3 on one.The fast guy then starts talking fast. I don't even really listen because it sounds like he's trying to sell me a car.“Because it kinda seems like you might be terrorizing the neighborhood. I am just concerned about what's APPROPRIATE you know. It’s a family neighborhood. Lots of kids around.”I pointed to the park behind me.At this point, it got weird.Confusion. “There's no park there,” said Middle, short for guy in the middle.It was pitch black to me but yes, I remembered the park right across the street from the abandoned house.“Right there.” I point again.“No.”“What! Wait. Are you sure?” I said starting to sound confused. Maybe I had gotten turned around in my quest to just get lost.This is when Middle slowly came closer. “Are you lost?” He said like he was talking to a suddenly innocent child instead of a woman he wanted to take care of a few moments ago.“Oh my god. Are you sleepwalking?” said Quick.“Here, let us help You!” They all we were coming towards me.Sensing danger I forced myself to open my eyes. They were shut. Oh my God, I didn't even know they were closed. I am so messed up right now, when I am seeing and not even seeing.I needed to get home fast.No!” I shouted and started backing away.“I'm fine! I just wanted to know the time and place for your parties.” I spat out as I turned on my heel, and gave them my backview.“Every Friday and Saturday night at ten!” I hear.“Thank you for the invite!” I respond.I tried not to run. I wanted to excude confidence to guarantee my escape.“I love how they walk,” Farley says.I exaggrate the movement even more and then once I had the required distance I felt I could out run someone, I ran as hard as I could.By the next morning, it was 24 hours since my stressful day started. I told my husband I let some guy sleep in the van. He ran out and checked. But he was already politely gone. I told him about my confrontation with the local biker gang and tried to plead my case that I was just so hung up on protecting the neighborhood and feeling so much fear from everyone locked in their homes at night.Seriously. The fear was just too much and I needed to get away. I needed to go where I felt the safest. Where was that? And then I remembered my paranoid friend and knew.And so I went and fell asleep in the van.Aftermath:I had always been worried about that abandoned house. After my night visitation, the gang moved on and i never saw bikes there again. In its place was a bunch of police tape stringing the entrance off.My husband had us moved out of this city in a week as we were month-to-month. He thought the city was too difficult for my sensitivities. The owner of our duplex sent the loveliest note saying what beautiful tenants we were. I kept it.Postscript: This was a time I did not manage my symptoms well.