The Final Leap (6 page)

According to a Bridge District report, there were 102 suicides and 386 thwarted attempts on the bridge from 1970 to 1972, when the Anshen & Allen study was being reviewed—more than in any three-year period in the bridge's history to that point (there were actually 112 confirmed suicides during this time according to other sources). Even so, Bridge District directors determined that none of the Anshen & Allen designs was acceptable. No specific reasons were given, but one thing that was clear was that money was not a factor. Instead of a suicide deterrent, Bridge District officials allocated $15 million of the $17.5 million they had in reserves for upgrading ferries and the ferry terminal, and replaced some of the bridge's vertical steel cables.

In his book
November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide
, George Howe Colt describes driving down a restricted road just south of the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza with Dr. Richard Seiden. There, in a meadow piled high with broken window casings, old ladders, chicken wire, and other detritus, Seiden showed Howe a steel fence. Writes Howe: “It was painted the same russet red as the Golden Gate Bridge. Its pencil-thin spires rose about eight feet into the air. On one-half of the fence the spires pointed toward the sky; on the other half they curved gently inward at the top, like the fingers of a cupped hand.” The two of them looked at the sculpture wordlessly for several seconds. Then Seiden said softly, “Winning design number 16. It's been sitting there for years.”

In 1973 Seiden, a Berkeley professor, wrote a paper published by the School of Public Health describing the magnetic attraction of certain suicide sites. Citing H. R. Fedden's book
Suicide: A Social and Historical Study
, Seiden recounted that at
Les Invalides
in France there had not been a suicide for the two years prior to 1792. Then a soldier hanged himself from a beam in one of the corridors. Within weeks, twelve other soldiers hanged themselves from the same beam. When the governor closed the corridor, the suicides ended. Similarly, in 1813, in the Swiss village of Saint Pierre Monjau, a woman hanged herself from a large tree. It wasn't long before other women died in the same way from the same branch. Seiden explained that the reasons why certain places develop a reputation for suicide are complex, but “an important component appears to be the fact that a person achieves the kind of notoriety and attention in death that he may not have received in a lifetime of loneliness and depression.” He went on to note that “particular methods or suicide plans have a deep personal significance, and are not capriciously transferred to another time or location.” Such is the case, he concluded, with the Golden Gate Bridge. It had developed a fatal lure. Seiden also cited examples—and several years later conducted his own research (described in chapter 8) to confirm—that if people are stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, they won't go somewhere else to kill themselves. For this reason, a suicide deterrent would be effective.

In 1976, the Bridge District considered closing the span to pedestrians on weekdays. According to the board president, Edwin M. Fraser, “This would stop 90 percent of the suicides off the bridge.” Tourists could still walk the bridge on weekends, and the bike lane on the west side would remain open to cyclists. The proposal ignited much debate—people didn't want to be denied access to the bridge—and eventually was defeated.

The same year, the district installed a fence on the southern section of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was chain link, eight feet high, 350 feet long, and not at all in keeping with the design of the bridge. While the aesthetic impact of a suicide barrier on the bridge was of great concern to many people, no one complained about this fence. Its purpose was not to save lives; it was put up to stop litter. People were dropping rocks, bottles, beer cans, and even a bowling ball onto the grounds of Fort Point below, which often had visitors, and board members felt that they needed to be protected. “It has been a continuous problem,” Dale Luehring, the bridge general manager, said at the time. Warning signs were posted on the bridge telling people that if they willingly dropped or threw an object from the bridge, it would be a misdemeanor and they would be prosecuted.

May 27, 1977, was the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. It also was the day that the parents of a nineteen-year-old jumper, Kenneth Pattison, filed a claim against the Bridge District alleging that the board was negligent in not providing a suicide barrier. The claim—the first of its kind— was a prerequisite before the district could be sued. The Pattisons said that their son wasn't under psychiatric care, had never attempted suicide to the best of their knowledge, and would be alive today if a barrier was in place. They didn't seek a monetary award; they sought a safe bridge. To date, there had been seven hundred confirmed deaths.

“The Bridge District has already admitted and recognized they have a responsibility to do something about suicides,” said Gene Rosenberg, the Pattison's attorney. “They've trained toll collectors and security guards to recognize and restrain potential suicides, and even installed TV monitors. Legally, once they have embarked on trying to prevent suicides, they are obligated to complete the task in a careful and diligent manner. But they've failed to do this; time and again, the Bridge District has refused to put in the one simple, effective measure to stop suicides—a suicide prevention barrier.”

Attorneys for the Bridge District rejected the claim, and the Pattisons did not take it further. In the ensuing years the mothers of two other jumpers would, though. Meanwhile, the issue of a bridge barrier was revisited because the existing railing was scheduled to be removed, sandblasted, and repainted. In what has to be considered the most ironic moment in the history of suicide prevention, a rally in favor of a barrier was organized on Memorial Day, March 31, 1977, by three religious leaders. One of the three was the Reverend Jim Jones, who called suicide victims “casualties of society” and the lack of a suicide barrier on the bridge a “symbol of social failure.” (Eighteen months later, Jones induced more than nine hundred of his Peoples Temple followers to swallow Kool Aid laced with cyanide in the jungles of Guyana.) The appeal for a suicide barrier went nowhere.

Twenty years after Bridge District board members decided that none of the barrier designs in the Anshen & Allen study was viable, the suicide barrier had became a forgotten subject, at least by the general public. The jumps, of course, continued as always, observed by innocent witnesses while Coast Guard crews continued to retrieve the bodies as loved ones mourned the deaths. Nevertheless, a feeling arose among suicide prevention advocates that publicizing the problem might be making it worse, resulting in imitative behavior. Clearly it was in the Bridge District's best interests that the media not report bridge suicides; however, possibly it was in the best interests of those most at risk that suicides go unnoticed, too. Mental health professionals collectively approached local media and asked them to refrain from reporting Golden Gate Bridge jumps when possible. Local media, for the most part, agreed, and for two decades most bridge jumps weren't covered.

In 1995 there were forty-five confirmed suicides from the bridge—up from thirty-nine the year before and the highest one-year total in history. Clearly, silence wasn't working. According to Bridge District engineer Mervin C. Giacomini, writing in a report to the board, “The statistics show that the majority of suicides were pedestrians (83 percent), most jumped from the east side of the Bridge (82 percent), and most occurred during daylight hours (77 percent).” Giacomini did not note—but a subsequent report did—that 76 percent of jumpers were men. In addition, 77 percent were under the age of fifty, and 24 percent were under the age of thirty, evidence that Golden Gate Bridge jumpers tended to be considerably younger than suicide victims in general. About two-thirds of all jumps were witnessed.

Despite the record number of deaths, the Bridge District board accepted the recommendation of its building and operating committee not to erect a suicide barrier on the bridge. Instead, directors voted to start foot and scooter patrols, allocating $76,736 for four temporary, part-time security officers who would be paid $14.50 per hour. The patrols, which began in April 1996, followed by two years the installation of thirteen emergency telephones on the bridge. The day the phones were installed, church bells rang throughout San Francisco and Mayor George Christopher proclaimed that they would save lives. Meanwhile, work began on a $402 million seismic retrofit of the bridge.

The patrols proved effective in that they stopped one person per week from jumping. They didn't stop everyone—twenty-three people jumped in 1996, and thirty-three in 1997. Still, with an annual budget of $93.8 million and a profit of $2.6 million in 1996, board members considered the patrols a good investment and voted to continue them; now at a cost of $110,000.

A new push took place in 1998 after the total number of deaths exceeded twelve hundred. Bridge District officials approved testing of a high-tension, flexible wire fence stretching six feet above the current railing. Thin, vertical “z-clips” that were virtually impossible to separate would keep the fence in place. The criteria used in the Anshen & Allen study in 1970 hadn't changed, however. In other words, the manufacturer had to design, develop, and test a prototype that “cannot cause safety or nuisance hazard to pedestrians or bridge personnel, must be totally effective as a barrier, cannot bar pedestrian traffic, weight cannot be beyond established allowable limits, cannot cause excessive maintenance problems, and aerodynamics cannot be beyond established allowable limits.”

Z-Clip International Fencing Systems of Danville, California, was hired to create a prototype. The results, when unveiled, were unsatisfactory. On the plus side, the fence was lightweight yet also hard to cut. Simple wire cutters wouldn't do it; a suicidal person would have to prepare in advance to carry bolt cutters. Also, it was designed so that the top wires were looser and curved back toward the walkway, making it difficult to surmount. On the negative side, many people considered the fence ugly and out of keeping with the bridge's design. When a 125-foot-long test section was displayed near the toll plaza, critics complained that it looked like “the chicken-wire fences that enclose concentration camps.” An architectural review committee labeled it hideous, and an editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
said that installing the fence “would be an act of vandalism.… To add such a jerry-rigged monstrosity to the graceful span would be a grave insult to San Francisco's landmark masterpiece.”

From April to September 1998, the Bridge District received twenty-seven items of public correspondence about the fence. Sixteen were in favor. Martha Killebrew, whose daughter, Jane, jumped from the bridge in 1972, expressed the view of many victims' families who said that any kind of barrier, regardless of appearance, was better than nothing. “To me, these wires are no more obtrusive than rear-window defrost lines in cars,” Killebrew said. “One just doesn't think about them.”

Eleven writers opposed the fence. One woman said that she moved from New York to California because New York “destroyed much of what was worthwhile” by having too many rules. “It is ironic that such a barrier intended to save lives actually makes life a little less worth living,” she concluded. Another woman wrote, “If and when I decide to die, I would prefer the bridge as an exit point, and I don't want to be kept from it by a high, jail-like railing.”

A man whose brother jumped four years earlier said that the bridge provided a useful service. His brother, he said, “had a clean death, involving no one else, unlike, for instance, stepping in front of a train,” and “I did not have to discover his body hanging from a chandelier or with open veins in the bathtub.”

A retired, twenty-eight-year-veteran in the California Highway Patrol expressed a similar opinion. “Not long ago,” he wrote, “a man jumped from a high floor in a hotel in San Francisco in the interior of the building, almost striking several doctors attending a function that was being held there. This is an example of what can happen if you make it impossible for them to jump from the bridge.”

A second problem with the z-clip fence, at least from the Bridge District's point of view, was that it wasn't foolproof. Five of fourteen people chosen to test the fence were able to climb over it. Those who succeeded were “mostly young and in good physical condition,” according to the bridge engineer's report. Four were males ages 27, 32, 36, and 41, all weighing under 190 pounds. One was female, age twenty-five, weighing 120 pounds. Adjustments were made, the space between fasteners was shortened from six to five feet, after which only one of the fourteen (the 120-pound woman) was successful. This didn't meet the district's requirement of 100 percent effectiveness, however. No one reported a curious fact about the testing, which was that in order to ensure everyone's safety, bridge personnel placed large airbags under each tester to cushion the person if he or she fell. The airbags alone gave each participant a two-foot advantage in reaching the railing. Also, no one noted that when the distance between fasteners was reduced to four feet, none of the participants was able to scale the fence.

A final problem with the z-clip fence was the price: $3 million. In addition to concerns about appearance and effectiveness, board members considered the cost prohibitive. This was before any wind tunnel tests were commissioned to determine whether the fence would affect aerodynamics. Yet board members did approve plans for a movable, median barrier on the bridge at an estimated cost of $15 million. The barrier would prevent crossover collisions, which had killed thirty-six people in the past twenty-eight years (an average of 1.3 fatalities per year).

In the fall of 2001, foot and motor patrols on the Golden Gate Bridge were increased. The reason wasn't because of suicides, it was because of 9/11. Just as the original surveillance equipment on the bridge was designed to monitor vehicle and pedestrian traffic, so were the added patrols intended to keep the bridge safe from terrorists. Suicide prevention was an afterthought.