Suicides tarnish the Golden Gate
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-02-03 10:03

Officials of San Francisco, California, the United States, are again grappling with an issue as old as the Golden Gate Bridge: how to stop people from killing themselves by jumping off the city's most famous landmark.

The American 'suicide resort' Golden Gate Bridge located in San Francisco, California [baidu]

Later next month the agency that oversees the towering, nearly 3-kilometer-long span that links San Francisco with Marin County, will decide whether to commission the most comprehensive study in a generation of erecting a suicide barrier. San Francisco's legislature also plans hearings.

"People's lives are involved and it is a sensitive issue," Maureen Middlebrook, president of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, said Monday.

"We have had family members come to us at board meetings in the past, and it is often times very tragic."

Sparking the latest debate are two films, one still in production, on bridge suicides. One film was shown at this month's Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

The most recent victim jumped last Thursday, adding to the more than 1,300 people who have plunged to their deaths since the bridge opened in 1937, making it the most popular suicide site in the United States and perhaps the world.

Board spokeswoman Mary Currie said a meeting of the 19-member agency set for Feb. 25 could result in the most formal study of the unwieldy issue since the early 1970s.

A look at the problem in 1998-99 focused mostly on past studies, she said, and a proposed suicide barrier design was rejected as not "totally effective."

Even as the death toll from the stunning orange-red structure has steadily increased over the years, officials have rejected calls for a suicide barrier, often for aesthetic reasons. But there are other considerations as well, officials say.

"Because it is a historic structure there are considerations with anything that we put on the bridge," Middlebrook said in an interview. "It also has huge technical considerations, particularly related to wind."

Money was also an issue, she said. Even with a one-way US$5 toll, the bridge is operating at a deficit.

Over the years officials have made moves against suicides, including adding crisis counseling telephones on the bridge in 1994.

Bridge patrols starting in 1996. The span also has security cameras.

But all of these countermeasures have not stopped the steady flow of desperate people from jumping off. Only a tiny handful have survived.

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