>>181892
AAGHarmeetDhillon @AAGDhillon - Bruise and a cut across my nose:
Thank God for the @USMarshalsHQ who took my team to safety,
Quote:
AAGHarmeetDhillon @AAGDhillon
I have a bruise on my head from the Secret Service running across my table and chairs while I ducked under the Washington Post table. Thank God for @USMarshalsHQ team who got me and my posse home safely!
https://x.com/AAGDhillon/status/2048252662856970603

AAGHarmeetDhillon @AAGDhillon - I have a bruise on my head from the Secret Service running across my table and chairs while I ducked under the Washington Post table. Thank God for @USMarshalsHQ team who got me and my posse home safely!
https://x.com/AAGDhillon/status/2048226278801625193

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta - Truck Mounted Attenuators are engineered to get rear-ended. There is a human sitting inside.
A TMA is a $50,000 sacrificial vehicle. The entire back end is an aluminum honeycomb cartridge that crushes in a controlled sequence, absorbing the kinetic energy of a 4,000-pound vehicle at 70 mph so the work crew ahead stays alive.
The driver parks the truck behind a pothole patching crew. Watches the mirrors. Waits to absorb whatever comes.
Missouri owns more than 500 of these. 50 hits last year works out to roughly one per week, every week, in a single state. Each replacement runs $50K. That is ~$2.5 million in destroyed vehicles in 2025 alone.
Every hit is a driver moving fast enough on a highway that they never saw a full-size truck with a flashing arrow board, LED signals, and a crash cushion sticking off the back. One motorist hit a MoDOT TMA at 70 mph with no brake marks on the record.
The average text takes five seconds to read. At 55 mph that is more than a football field driven blind. Missouri passed a hands-free law in 2023 because the baseline for driver attention dropped far enough that road crews could not safely repair a pothole without a sacrificial vehicle between them and traffic.