San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate bridge, a popular tourist site and an even more popular place to commit suicide – is getting a 76 million dollar safety net of steel wires.
“So the system is a stainless steel net made up of wires, the wires are about five thirty seconds inch thick stretched very tightly between horizontal supports, the horizontal supports are tube members, about eight inches by eight inches and they extend out from the side of the bridge about twenty-three feet from the side of the bridge and they are located about twenty feet down from sidewalk elevation itself,” says John Eberle, deputy district engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge.
The plan to create suicide barriers on the bridge, where 1,600 people have leapt to their deaths since the span opened in 1937, was a subject of controversy for decades, with opponents arguing they would mar the structure’s beauty.
According to John Eberle, the steel safety net of wires will be located far enough from the bridge to avoid obstructing views.
“We selected it because number one it is located below the sidewalk level so it doesn’t obstruct views of the city or the bay and number two we put it down at an elevation where people will really have to think about jumping into it, because it’s not going to be a soft landing. You’re going to land into this net, so we located it at a distance that it would not be comfortable if you actually jumped and fell into it. We wanted to deter people. It’s twenty feet down, it’s like falling off of a two story building, it’s a very far drop and you really don’t want to do that because you will be hurt,” Eberle told Reuters.
On Tuesday (October 13) the bridge authority invited companies to bid for the project. Getting funding for the project has been a challenge – some critics say funds would be better spent for mental health care to prevent suicide attempts in the first place.
Most of the people working on the bridge have training to help those in distress, and security patrol the site as well – but it’s not been enough to stop the suicides.
According to officials in 2014, 38 people jumped to their deaths from the span, which hovers high above San Francisco Bay and connects the city of San Francisco with suburban Marin County. The Golden Gate is the second-most popular bridge for suicide in the world, after China’s Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge.
“You know, what we’re looking for is to deter people from jumping. We’ve done studies in Europe in Switzerland, Germany, also on the East Coast Ithaca by Cornell University they put up similar net systems where the nets have been installed it’s deterred people almost a hundred percent from actually even trying to jump off those structures. So we do believe with that past history and with the location and the material that it will deter most people from trying to jump,” Eberle said.
The authority hopes the safety net will be in place by 2019. (Reuters)
