I designed the bollard across the next ten days. The design specifications were as follows. Twelve-inch outer-diameter schedule-80 black steel pipe. Yield strength forty-two thousand pounds per square inch minimum. Twelve feet total length. Eight feet anchored in a concrete-filled twenty-inch-diameter footing extending four feet below frost depth. Four feet of exposed bollard above grade. The exposed section would be sleeved with a custom trash-can-shaped fiberglass cover that matched the appearance of the county-issued ninety-six-gallon trash cans exactly. The cover would be visually indistinguishable from a real trash can from the road. The cover would mount onto the bollard with three quick-release pins that allowed me to remove the cover and roll out an actual trash can for Friday pickup. The bollard would remain in place permanently. The trash-can sleeve would be the visible disguise.
I welded the bollard across three days in the second week of March in my shop. I poured the footing on the fifteenth of March, with help from Wesley, who drove down from Akron for the weekend. We used thirty-thousand-PSI concrete with rebar reinforcement to ODOT roadside specifications. We let the concrete cure for seven days. I installed the steel bollard on the twenty-second of March. I welded the fiberglass-cover mount system on the twenty-third. I installed the cover the same evening. I rolled an actual trash can up to the road on Thursday evening, the twenty-eighth of March, in the normal Friday-pickup configuration. The cover sleeve was directly behind the actual trash can, indistinguishable from a second trash can if you were not looking for steel.
Friday, the fifth of April, 2024, she left her driveway at 7:28. The camera caught the Escalade at thirty-one miles an hour, then the same rightward correction two car lengths out. At 7:32 she hit what she thought was the second can. The fiberglass sleeve split and rolled. The schedule-80 pipe did not. The Escalade stopped as if it had struck a bridge pier. Twenty-eight miles an hour into eight feet of concrete-anchored steel. Fourteen thousand eight hundred dollars in front-end damage. Radiator. Headlight wiring. Bumper. The real county can, the one in front, rolled away undamaged. I walked down from the porch with my coffee in my left hand. I said, “Mrs. Westbrook Calhoun, good morning. The fiberglass cover slides off if you push the three pins. Underneath is twelve inches of structural steel I welded last month. The county trash can is in the garage. The bollard does not move.”
She did not speak. She got back in the Escalade. The vehicle was not drivable. The impact had damaged the cooling system and the headlight wiring. The vehicle had stalled. She tried to restart it. It would not start. She called a tow truck. The tow truck arrived at 8:20. The Escalade was towed to a Wooster collision-repair shop. The insurance assessor visited the scene at 9:45. He reviewed the security-camera footage I provided. He filed his initial report at noon. The initial assessment classified the incident as a single-vehicle collision with a permanent fixed roadside structure, vehicle at fault per documented driving pattern, structure within the property line per county survey, insurance coverage applicable to vehicle damage only. The insurance company paid Sloan fourteen thousand eight hundred dollars in vehicle damage, minus her two-thousand-dollar deductible, across approximately three weeks of claim processing. The insurance company also filed a small subrogation claim against Sloan personally for the documented twenty-three prior trash-can crushings, a claim that would later become part of her civil settlement.