San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bridge officials tout safety net against suicide
For years, patrol officer Roger Elauria would don a navy blue uniform, clock into work at the Golden Gate Bridge, and spend hours in the raw wind or fog, eyes sweeping the regal orange span in search of despondent souls.
Now a captain, Elauria said his long tenure has brought him in contact with numerous people who bore what bridge officials call the “thousand-yard stare.” They are almost always alone, not pushing a stroller or snapping a selfie, oblivious to seemingly everything except the low railing, the 220-foot plunge to a vast body of water, and the prospect of near-certain death.
Over the past six years, construction crews have built a structure to catch and deter jumpers — an intricate net with enough marine-grade steel to cover seven football fields, representing a concerted effort to engineer against tragedy.
As of Jan. 1, the net is mostly complete.
“It’s all, if you wish, sealed up with either fencing or netting,” said Denis Mulligan, general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. He nodded toward a window on the east wall of his office in the bridge administration building. It overlooked craggy hillsides, the rumpled bay and the mist-draped towers of the Golden Gate, the net beneath them barely perceptible.
But even at this celebratory milestone, with a vast steel web stretching from either end of the span and tall fences to patch the gaps, Mulligan acknowledged the barrier’s shortcomings.
While the net was still under construction last year, “we did have some people jump into (the) net,” Mulligan said. Bridge ironworkers and firefighters managed to rescue some of them, he continued. Others jumped again.
Mulligan addressed this fact with sober optimism.
“It’s kind of like the seat belt and the airbag,” he said. “If we can save 30 people a year, and not 31, that’s better than sitting on your hands and doing nothing.”
He and other bridge district officials have embraced a philosophy of the almost-perfect. Even the plodding construction work, accompanied by a steady stream of publicity around the nets, correlated with diminishing bridge suicides. For decades, the Golden Gate averaged about 30 confirmed suicides each year. But last year that number dipped to 14.
“We are fully aware that it’s a deterrent system, not a foolproof system,” said Elauria, adding that he found the numbers reassuring. Still, the captain recognized that his work, and that of the patrol officers he supervises, is not over.
The $224 million project has in the past faced criticism over aesthetics, cost, the drawn-out timeline and the inconvenience of traffic closures. Most complaints have dampened over time — particularly as people looked over the sides of the bridge to see the net taking shape in 2020, with sprawling sections visible along the midspan by 2022.
Yet even this month, as bridge administrators touted the firm steel web that stretched for nearly the full 1.7-mile length of the Golden Gate’s east and west sides, some people remained skeptical.
Among them is Dr. John Maa, a trauma surgeon at MarinHealth Medical Center, the hospital that receives people rescued after leaping from the bridge’s rails.
On New Year’s Day, Maa rode his bike from Crissy Field to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, heading toward Sausalito.
When he reached the middle of the span, Maa saw a cluster of police cars and four people craning to see over the western side of the bridge — the bicycle path that faces the Pacific Ocean. A flare sent plumes of smoke from the water, marking coordinates for an approaching police vessel. It had likely drifted from the eastern side, where other bystanders had gathered.
What happened remained unclear: No one who spoke to Maa that day had seen a person jump. But the scene reinforced the surgeon’s impression that the steel net had vulnerabilities.
He later called the MarinHealth trauma surgeons who were working that day, to advise that a patient might arrive. No one ever did.
Spokespeople for the bridge district and the Coast Guard could not confirm the Jan. 1 incident.
“We’re better off doing something to save a lot of lives, as opposed to sitting on our hands and arguing for a perfect solution which does not exist, which merely provides a means to do nothing,” Mulligan said.
“I’m very hopeful for the net,” Maa said, commending all the work that went into the project — especially the advocacy of people like Kevin Hines, who jumped from the bridge in 2000, when he was 19 years old. He survived the fall, buoyed — he believes — by a compassionate sea lion who circled beneath him in the water and kept his injured body afloat.
Hines went on to become a public speaker for suicide prevention.
Since 2000, surgeons at MarinHealth have treated 29 people for wounds they suffered after plummeting from the Golden Gate Bridge, 17 of whom lived through the experience. Three of those patients jumped after July 2022, as the net inched toward completion.
“I just wonder if there might be a modification or improvements to make it work more effectively,” Maa said. “I’m providing gentle feedback.”
To the administrators, advocates and bridge district board directors who oversaw a long, arduous construction period — preceded by an even longer period of public debate over whether to build any barrier at all — the suicide prevention net is a hard-fought victory.
Ideas for some sort of protective infrastructure began gestating as far back as the 1950s, when officials considered stringing barbed wire over the rails. Subsequent proposals from the 1970s and ’80s included fencing with horizontal wires that become slack and harder to maneuver as people climb up.
Many of these concepts faltered, owing to whimsical design and engineering, widespread fretting about conserving the beauty of the bridge, and dismissive societal attitudes toward suicide.
It wasn’t until 2006 that discussion of a barrier began in earnest, and even then, debate raged on. Mulligan recalled the public comment period in 2008, after the district released a draft environmental impact report.
About 3,500 people and organizations weighed in, Mulligan said. Some considered the bridge “easy access to lethal means,” tantamount to a loaded handgun on a coffee table, he remembered. Others chided the district for daring to touch such an elegant piece of infrastructure. “People have a really strong emotional attachment to this bridge,” he said. “They ran a marathon on this bridge. Their memory of coming home from Vietnam is on a ship going under this bridge. They proposed to their partner on the bridge.”
He pointed out, moreover, that the Golden Gate is one of those rare manmade structures that enhances the beauty of a natural landscape, with its Art Deco spires and delicate weave of cables.
“All too often when humans come in and build something, we make the setting worse,” Mulligan said. “I would proffer that this time, we built something and made it better,” he added, citing qualities that made the bridge an international icon, and a destination for people seeking to end their lives.
Retired Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes realized the importance of a suicide deterrent system after Marin County took custody of Golden Gate Bridge fatalities in 1990, when the U.S. Coast Guard moved its dock from San Francisco to Horseshoe Cove in Marin County.
Before that time, Holmes dealt with a modest number of suicides, and with the occasional bridge jumper who washed ashore in Marin. But once Holmes began overseeing autopsies of all the bodies recovered, the sheer volume stunned him.
“We were seeing 30 to 40 a year,” he said. “That’s when I began to understand the gravity of what was going on at the bridge.”
By the end of last year, the net nearly stretched from the bridge’s end points in San Francisco and Marin. From different vantage points, it resembled a cyclone fence or a cradle, bolstered by struts that are painted the same ripe-orange hue as the bridge. District staff have a name for these steel frames: “support arms.” The term denotes their structural role, as well as their function — to catch and hold people.
Last month, bridge officials met with organizers from the Bridge Rail Foundation, a nonprofit committed to ending suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, for a presentation on the net’s progress.
Advocates, including John Bateson, author of “The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge,” described an overwhelming sense of relief as construction entered the final stages. It won’t technically be complete until 2026, when the contractor finishes redesigning a maintenance trolley system that runs along the outside of the span. And in the meantime, the bridge district and its contractor are battling each other in court over delays and cost increases.
Bateson is largely satisfied.
“By and large, it will discourage people from going to the bridge, seeking to end their lives,” he said.
Kymberlyrenee Gamboa said she felt overcome with joy when she visited the bridge on Sept. 20, 2022, the ninth anniversary of her 18-year-old son Kyle’s death. He had climbed the railing and jumped near light pole 77 on a clear day in 2013.
Two months after Kyle died, Gamboa and her husband began attending bridge district board meetings to push for a suicide barrier. Nine years later, Gamboa peered over the rail and saw it. By that point, workers had sewn large sections of steel chain together, forming a net that, from a distance, looked almost diaphanous against the choppy water.
“When I looked over to where my son had jumped, and I saw net — that floored me,” Gamboa said, struggling to choke back a sob. “If this had been there, it could have saved my son. And now it will save other people.”