Monday, May 30th, 2005
As a counterpoint to yesterday’s piece about living forever, here’s one about dying young.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a popular tourist destination. But as is true with lots of landmarks that offer dramatic downward views, more people come to see it than go home to tell their friends afterwards.
Not everybody who jumps dies, although most do. And it’s not a pretty way to go:
In 1988, a failed publicity stunt sent one man plunging into the water inside a large plastic garbage can.Jumpers … hit the water … at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures.
The fall broke both of [the man’s] ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived — becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate.
There’s nothing funny about suicide, but I laughed when I read that some of the people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, presumably with a vision of dropping gracefully into the water to disappear below the waves in a sort of romantic farewell, instead hit the southern tip of Sausalito.
From the pictures, Sausalito looks like a pretty easy thing to miss, but from a pedestrian’s point of view there is a long span of something that looks like the bridge that isn’t anywhere near the water. (Photo courtesy Ken Adelman’s wondrous californiacoastline.org.)
In January, the Chron ran a story about Eric Steel, a documentary filmmaker who filmed the bridge constantly for a year. Steel recorded about 20 jumpers, and plans to make a full-length documentary about the bridge suicides. The Chronicle published his comments in January, in an article called Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge:
My crew and I spent an entire year looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute… We observed and filmed most of the two dozen or so suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts.
[O]n several occasions during the year, my crew and I were the first callers to the bridge patrol offices when we saw these events begin to unfold.
Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie tells a related story. While accompanying a foot patrol, she encountered a man who seemed like a jump risk:
[H]er group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.
“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week.”
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posted to channel: Personal
updated: 2005-06-03 13:29:44
