The Final Leap (7 page)

Only with new funding in 2005 from the federal Metropolitan Transportation Commission did the Bridge District approve a $2 million study to once again consider the feasibility of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. There was one major difference this time: the requirement that the barrier had to be 100 percent effective was dropped. There were two reasons for this. One was because it was a requirement that was proving to be virtually impossible for any manufacturer to meet. While restricting access to lethal means can prevent most people from killing themselves, someone who is truly intent on dying will go to extraordinary lengths sometimes, taking actions that others don't expect and can't plan for. The more compelling reason, though, was because promoting a barrier as being 100 percent effective exposed the Bridge District to liability if there was a death. It was better to have a barrier that was 95 percent effective than risk a future lawsuit by claiming that it was foolproof.

The Bridge District also tested the wind performance of taller railings on the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2007, Jon Raggett, the owner of West Wind Laboratory, set up a five-foot scale model representing the middle section of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is the section most vulnerable to high winds. The railings on the model were proportionate to the four-foot-high railings that actually existed on the bridge. Raggett gave the model a gentle push, then turned on a fan that was next to it, producing the equivalent of a seventy-one-mile-per-hour wind. The model rocked slowly side to side, then faster and wouldn't stop. “At this rate, pieces would start falling off the bridge,” Raggett told onlookers. “Then we would see catastrophic failure.”

Turning off the fan and stopping the swaying of his model, Raggett added small, flat sheets above the railing as if the whole railing had been raised several feet, as proposed by various antisuicide designs. He gave the model a slight push and turned on the fan again. The bridge came to a complete stop, even when the fan was cranked up to approximate wind speeds of 130 miles per hour. Raggett determined that if the Golden Gate Bridge had a fourteen-foot-tall suicide barrier, it was possible for the bridge to withstand westerly winds of one hundred miles per hour—an event considered likely to occur only once every ten thousand years. As it is, the bridge is closed when winds exceed seventy miles per hour, something that has happened three times (in 1951, 1982, and 1983).

Raggett was hired for his technical expertise, but he also had a personal interest in the project. A friend of his had driven to the Golden Gate Bridge planning to jump. The only reason he didn't was because he couldn't find a parking space. That alone was enough of a deterrent. Imagine if there was a real deterrent, Raggett believed, one that was intentionally designed. Lives would be saved.

Because the Golden Gate Bridge is considered to be one of the greatest engineering feats in the world, any structural changes to it, such as a suicide barrier, are viewed first and foremost from an engineering perspective. Wind resistance is part of it. The bridge is designed so that wind moves through it, which is why the bridge's walkways can't be walled in with clear fiberglass. That would create vortex shedding or “unstable flutter”—the colloquial term—leading a suspension bridge to lurch uncontrollably. Instead, wind needs to be able to move freely through the structure.

According to Denis Mulligan, for many years the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge who was promoted to chief executive and general manager in September 2010, it's possible to think of a cross section of the bridge as the wing of an airplane. If you change the flap, you change the way that the wing responds to wind. The same is true, he says, of the bridge. Thus, even the handrails that were added in 2003 to the barrier that separates the pedestrian and bike lanes from vehicle traffic had to be carefully considered. Current bridge architect Donald MacDonald designed them to be as thin as possible so that they would not impede wind flow.

Add to the issue of wind resistance the issue of aesthetics, which is paramount for many people, and engineering becomes more challenging. While a suicide barrier doesn't need to enhance the design of the bridge, it's widely believed that it can't detract from it. In addition, a barrier can't be too heavy, can't interfere with regular bridge operations, and can't be too difficult to maintain. Practically speaking, it shouldn't require more attention than any other element of the bridge. The only difference a barrier should make is to stop people from jumping.

Twice in the past fifteen years, engineering students at the University of California, Berkeley have designed a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge as a class project. Their professor, Robert Bea, requires students to select a real-life challenge with social implications, then incorporate actual constraints—cost, environmental regulations, and politics—into their engineering designs. Bea gained prominence in 2010 as an expert in the design and construction of oil rigs who explained to national audiences how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred, laying the blame squarely on BP. Previously he consulted on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, and other tragedies, earning the nickname “Dr. Disaster” from his students.

For his class, Civil Engineering 180: Design of Enhanced Structures, Bea divides students into teams of four so that they learn how to approach challenges collectively. This is how the real world functions; people don't design and build things in a vacuum. He tells the teams that they can work on any project that interests them as long as it's practical and has social value. His goal, he tells me, “is to educate young engineers that there's such a thing as public service.”

Four students in Bea's 1997 class chose a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge as their project. They based their design on the top-rated Anshen & Allen option in 1970. Anshen & Allen's recommendation was rejected because the barrier wasn't 100 percent effective; several people were able to climb over it. The Berkeley students—Walt Aldrich, Casey Bowden, Lori Dunn, and Serena Volpp—added thin, vertical cables spaced six inches apart so that they would be too small to squeeze through. “Not only would it be more effective,” Bowden said at the time, “but our design weighs less than the current rail and is less affected by the wind. It shows that a suicide barrier is not so much an engineering problem as a political problem.”

The students readily admitted that their design had limitations. Primarily, it would be difficult and expensive to construct, but other, more experienced engineers could deal with that. The goal of the students was to show that a suicide barrier could be effective and also aesthetically pleasing. “We think a safe and attractive suicide barrier can be built,” Dunn told a reporter. “With our report and model, we hope to bring more attention to the need for a suicide barrier.”

Each team of engineering students presented their final projects, including engineering reports and physical models, to a panel of judges recruited by Bea. In 1997, the team that designed the Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier won top honors. Bea called their project “real professional” and said that, in his opinion, “the bridge looks better rather than worse. I was amazed.”

In 2005, another team of Bea's students revisited the idea of designing a suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge. This time, instead of modifying a previous concept, they started from scratch. The team—Danielle Hutchings, Robert Simpson, Ryan Stauffer, and Douglas Wahl—designed three different barriers, each one taking into account engineering challenges and aesthetic concerns. Of the four, Wahl had a special interest in the project. His cousin had died by suicide four years earlier.

“She didn't jump from the bridge,” he was quoted as saying, “but that experience prompted me to think about what goes through people's minds when they're thinking about killing themselves.… If we can take away the means to easily complete the act, such as creating a barrier on a bridge, we can often get people past that suicidal state.”

In creating their designs, the 2005 team drew on the expertise of people in realms far different than their own. This included psychiatrists, psychologists, and officers in the Oakland Police Department who intervened in suicide attempts. The 1997 team also consulted on the 2005 project. Eight years into professional careers, each was happy to assist the next generation of engineers.

As in the past, each team's final project was presented to a panel of judges for review. This time one of the judges was Denis Mulligan, a Berkeley graduate who was the Bridge District's chief engineer. In recounting the experience, Mulligan told me that all of the students were “very passionate, young engineers” whose concepts were solid. The suicide barrier team didn't have access to data for wind dynamics on bridges specifically; nevertheless, they created workable designs. The 2005 team, like the 1997 team, was awarded first place.

“One of the things we are so proud of,” Hutchings told a
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter, “is that these designs keep the aesthetics of the bridge in addition to saving 20 lives a year.”

On the occasion of the sixty-eighth anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, in 2005, the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California sponsored the presentation of the students' three designs to Tom Ammiano and Cynthia Murray, the two Bridge District board members who were the strongest supporters of a barrier. Ammiano and Murray said that the designs were well conceived and in keeping with the bridge's architecture. Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer who presided over construction, probably would have approved.

As it was, Strauss didn't live long enough to see his creation turn into the world's number one suicide site. He died in May 1938 of a heart attack, eleven days before the first anniversary of the bridge's opening. It is commonly believed that his death was induced by the stress of the project. At one point during construction, he suffered a breakdown and was absent from the site for six months. Only when the Bridge District threatened to fire him did he return to work. Still, his health may have been affected as much by the stress of knowing what he had created as by the creation itself. At the time of his death, six people had jumped, and Strauss probably had a good idea about what the bridge was becoming.
New Yorker
writer Tad Friend reported that at the dedication ceremony, A.R. O'Brien, the bridge's director, said that Strauss “put everything he had” into the bridge “and out of its completion he go so little.… The Golden Gate Bridge, for my dead friend, turned out to be a mute monument of misery.”

Leon Moisseiff, the engineer who believed that it was possible to span the Golden Gate Strait with what turned out to be the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, went on to be the lead designer of a suspension bridge in Washington State. The bridge, built in 1940 on the same theory as the Golden Gate Bridge, and crossing the Tacoma Narrows in Puget Sound, was nicknamed “The Galloping Gertie” because of the way it moved in the wind. With no small measure of pride, Moisseiff called it the “most beautiful bridge in the world,” even more beautiful than the Golden Gate Bridge. Shortly after it was completed, however, it twisted apart in a forty-two mile-per-hour wind, forever damaging Moisseiffs reputation. He died three years later of a heart attack. The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge sent a chill up the backs of Golden Gate Bridge District officials. They feared that any structural change to their world-famous span, such as a higher railing, might produce a similar effect.

Meanwhile, Charles Ellis, the engineer whose voluminous mathematical computations were the basis for the Golden Gate Bridge's construction, was not fully acknowledged for his contributions until well after his death. Strauss fired Ellis before actual construction began, saying that “The structure was nothing unusual and did not require all the time, study, and expense which [Ellis] thought necessary for it.” Then Strauss turned the job over to Clifford Paine, an Ellis protégé, who used Ellis's design, making only minor changes to it. Ellis's colleagues believed that the real reason for the firing was because Strauss was jealous. He didn't like it that Bridge District directors were going to Ellis for information rather than coming to him.

Ellis retired from the faculty at Purdue University in 1947 at age seventy-two, and died two years later. He's remembered as a self-effacing man, uninterested in the limelight. He didn't spend a lot of time bemoaning his dismissal, and it's not known whether he ever saw the Golden Gate Bridge in person after it was completed. Nevertheless, he kept a picture of the bridge over his desk at work and was known to say, if anyone brought it up, “I designed every stick of steel on that bridge.”

The archives at Purdue contain Ellis's papers, letters, and engineering drawings with his signature on them, plus telegrams and photographs. Once they were unearthed, it was suggested to the Golden Gate Bridge District that Ellis receive some sort of tribute as the true designer. Since a statue of Joseph Strauss was erected near the bridge, perhaps a portion of the span could be named in Ellis's honor. The matter was referred to a historical research committee of the American Association of Civil Engineers. The committee confirmed Ellis's work, but the drive to see that Ellis receive proper credit lost momentum. With the passage of time, and all of the key players deceased, no one really cared who did what. All that mattered was that the bridge was built, and that it was an architectural and engineering triumph. The person who made, perhaps, the single greatest contribution to the construction of one of the modern wonders of the world became a mere footnote in history.

As for Irving Morrow, the man who designed the pedestrian walkways and in all likelihood made the decision to lower the railing on the bridge, thereby creating the opportunity for virtually anyone of any age to jump, he returned to his architectural business, designing residential and commercial buildings with his wife. If he had any regrets about the bridge, he didn't express them publicly. Morrow died in 1952 at the age of sixty-eight. At that time, the official number of bridge suicides was under 150. In the coming years it would escalate dramatically.