Tragic and Fatal
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is both an aesthetic and engineering marvel, and is justifiably famous for these qualities. These same qualities, however, make it a mecca for jumpers. Walking across the bridge, one sees these signs at frequent intervals:
I’m a little ambivalent about suicides: the right to kill yourself is murky ground for libertarians. The tragedy of this plaque, on the North End of the bridge, is however unarguable:
Two year old Gauri Govil was walking across the bridge with her family in 1997 when she tripped and fell through a gap between the metal I beams that separated the sidewalk from the roadway. It appears that this had simply never happened before so the gap had not been regarded as a safety hazard. She didn’t fall into the water, she actually fell on to the ground, which brings up an interesting point:
You always think of jumpers going off the middle of the span into the water but, if you really want to kill yourself, it seems like you’d be much surer if you go off the bridge onto the rocks at either end:
I guess, however, that if you were willing to do this, you’d just as soon jump off a building onto concrete. There must be something about landing in water.
A lot of people do get talked down. I found out about this, and about one guy who did it over 30 times, through a previous blog posting.
