Steep driveway in need of some kind of guardrail - need help

[bcp]

How about a tall curb "to control water?" Then it can't be claimed to be a faulty guardrail.

Some ideas:
http://america-by-rv.blogspot.com/2011/09/glacier-np-going-to-sun-road.html

Bruce

 

[Bubbanewf]

I live in TN also. Unless you live in a community that has regs. on what you can have at your property etc. You should be able to put in what you want. I doubt putting in something to help is worse than not having anything at all.
We dont even have guard rails on our county roads with sheer drop offs in many places. That should give you a clue.
I would put in a rough cut wooden fence using 2 inch oak planks. they will bounce most cars off of it without doing a lot of damage. 36 to 48 inches high should suffice for most vehicles. I would stain it using oil based stain.
If you live where the community regulates everything including what color curtains you can hang in the windows, then you are out of luck.
Talk to a local lawyer. He will know if there is anything to worry about. You are responsible to use reasonable care to keep visitors safe.
Another idea would be to plant fast growing trees . They need to be close together, so they also need to be narrow at the top like hybrid pears. It doesnt take too long before they could keep a car from going down the hill.

 

[Dr_Zinj]

Get some old telephone poles and sink them 3 to 4 feet deep. Run a couple parallel lines of 1/2 inch stainless steel cable through them all, and anchor in about 500lbs of buried cement at each end.

 

[jmc]

"Your Honor, those are not 'guard rails', they are 'deceleration rails'."

 

[Ken45101]

We dont even have guard rails on our county roads with sheer drop offs in many places. That should give you a clue.

LOL. Our nearest state route (Ohio 763) doesn't have space for guard rails before the vertical drop into the creek 15' below. Heck, some places even the fog line has fallen into the creek!

 

[Pirate]

A curb would not work. I'm on top of a ridge. In the fall, all the leaves are blown over the edges to the woods below. A curb would make my work just an itsy bit harder.

 

[vtsnowedin]

I normally dont' like to resurrect old posts but my question is about the same.

What really is the legal requirement to put in a guardrail along my drive?

I have about a 100' that is almost sheer drop of about 10'. I called a local company that makes guardrails and he talked about liability issues of putting in system that is not crash tested. So, if I put in a home made guard rail system and some knucklehead rolls over the edge, I guess I am liable because my home built guardrail didn't stop them. If I don't have anything, is the driver responsible for not driving good? Hard to say these days because everyone sues everyone for anything.

That is an interesting question. A natural cliff on your property that you have done nothing to is probably not a problem but build a road that directs motorist towards the cliff and that does not direct them into a safe path past the hazard and youæ±*e in jeopardy. Highway builders try to avoid having errant cars roll over after they leave the pavement as that leads to deaths. A cost analysis usually comes up with a height of fill where just filling the slope out to a four to one. ( a slope that a car is unlikely to roll on ) is more expensive then putting a guard rail on the top of the slope that keeps the cars in the road. Of course the filled out four to one slope lasts forever and the rails rust or rot out every twenty years or so therefore the calculation is just a guestimate. Anyway anything over ten feet high usually gets a guard rail.
Now as to types: the first level is just reflectors on weak posts set so that a driver can see two or three of them at any time and thereby see where to steer past the hazard. Next is single posts set at twenty five foot intervals with reflectors on them so a driver can see the shape of the curve. Next is strong posts (eight inches through or bigger) set so a car sliding on ice should fetch up on a post before it goes over the edge. These are set at twelve foot six inches or one level up at six foot three inches to make it hard to fit between them at the usual departure angle. Next is a cable strung on the post to catch cars trying to slip between them. Then two ,then three cables to hold more and larger vehicles. Then you move up to steel beam panels which work better then the cables with or without offset blocks with wood or steel posts.
Put in steel posts with steel panel W beam on blocks and you are done and the lawyers should leave you alone as the highway department has lots bigger pockets then you do.
If you have a tractor ? you might just string a line of BFD rocks along the edge of the road and paint them white so the cars can see them and avoid the cliff just by keeping their fenders off the rocks.

 

[dmccarty]

We are not in the mountains but we have some drops off the nearby road that has to be a good 20 feet and there are not guard rails of any kind. A dump truck went off the road a few years ago and went into the woods. He was lucking in that he went off the road where the drop off was not too bad but I would have expected him to have rolled the truck which somehow did NOT happen. Not sure how though. There are plenty of roads around my area that do not have but need guard rails.

Decades back my mother and aunt were driving from Highlands NC to Franklin NC on US 64. This road is VERY narrow with a mountain on one side a a cliff on the other and lots of sharp turns. In SOME curves there is a small rock "guardrail." It sure as heck is not going to stop most cars from going over the cliff. At one time, semis would use this section of road which is insane. I think they now have signs to hopefully prevent semis from going on this section of US 64. Anywho, a semi went down that road and even though it was going real slow around the curves, he still hit the car my mom and aunt were in. One tire was off the cliff but they were able to get out of the car. If the semi had been going faster....

I think the contractor was tossing the Liability word out there to get some business.

I might talk to a lawyer about this, but if it was just my family using the driveway and a few others, I suspect I would just put in some PT posts and some heavy PT timbers for rails. Putting in the posts might be interesting on a rocky mountain side.

Later,
Dan