A cable guardrail that might have prevented three deaths in a rainy Christmas crash was ruined and left unrepaired after three previous crashes at the same spot on a U.S. 64 median in Wendell, the Highway Patrol said Friday.

North Carolina is recognized in other states as a leader in saving lives with cable barriers that stop catastrophic crashes across freeway medians. But the Wendell deaths exposed weaknesses in the state's ability to track damaged barriers and make timely repairs.

Transportation Secretary Lyndo Tippett announced corrective measures late Friday.

After a car hydroplaned into the U.S. 64 median barrier on Oct. 6, a trooper left a yellow vinyl state property tag on the damaged cables to alert state Department of Transportation maintenance officials, said First Lt. Everett Clendenin, a Highway Patrol spokesman. The trooper reported that another yellow tag had been hung there already, marking damage from an earlier crash.

DOT had not repaired the cables before a third wreck at the same location Nov. 7, when a Loomis Fargo armored truck overturned on the median, the Highway Patrol said. But the barrier was partly intact, and Wendell's fire chief said the cables kept the heavy truck from rolling into oncoming traffic.

There were no cables left on Dec. 25 to snag a Chevy Tahoe that veered through the breached barrier and collided head-on with a car. Three members of a Hillsborough family were killed.

Troopers filed misdemeanor death by vehicle charges Friday against the Tahoe driver, Billy Ray Bullock Jr. of Raleigh.

Tom Vaughan, Wendell's fire chief, said it was the first cross-median crash he could recall since the mid-1990s, when DOT began installing cable barriers along freeways.

"They're wonderful," Vaughan said Friday. "I commend DOT for putting them up. But if you don't maintain them, they're not effective."

Cecil H. Neville of Pinehurst, a retired orthopedic surgeon, said that on a drive Wednesday between Wendell and Tarboro he counted 34 places on U.S. 64 where the cables had been knocked down.

"You can see that many of them occurred back in the summer, because the grass has already grown in around the damaged cable and around the tire tracks," Neville said. "DOT has done nothing to repair those cables."

A DOT contractor fixed the cable barrier at the Wendell crash site Tuesday, 15 days after the Dec. 25 wreck that took the lives of Barbara S. and Charles H. Burger Jr., both 57, and their son, Ivan, 20. Two days later, the contractor returned to fix a handful of other barrier breaches along U.S. 64/264 in the Wendell area, Vaughan said.

A News & Observer reporter counted five damaged places in the U.S. 64/264 cable barrier Friday on a 20-mile drive from the Interstate 440 Beltline to N.C. 39 in eastern Wake County. A half-mile stretch of cable on Interstate 40 near Wade Avenue had at least four damaged sections.

More flexible than concrete barriers and heavy steel rails, the cable barriers snag runaway cars and trucks with triple strands of steel rope, gently slowing and stopping them. But, just as an automobile air bag is good for a single crash, a cable barrier often is rendered useless after it prevents an accident.

Rails need attention

"Probably every time it gets hit, it's going to have to have some kind of repair," said Richard Albin, assistant state design engineer for the Washington state DOT. Albin serves on a national panel chaired by Kevin Lacy, North Carolina's state traffic engineer, that is working to improve the use of guardrails.

"We've saved well over 150 lives in North Carolina since 1994, and we've prevented countless injuries," Lacy said Friday. "The system has been performing very well. There have been incidents, such as this very unfortunate crash, that have brought some issues to light."

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