The Golden Gate Bridge is another ICON which should be enjoyed....
Golden Gate Bridge is the world's most popular site for suicide: 'Just why do they make it so easy?’
San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is 75 years old tomorrow. It is also the world’s premier venue for the final leap.
The Golden Gate Bridge is 75 years old tomorrow, a masterpiece of construction marrying strength and grace. There are longer suspension bridges but none more recognisable than America’s Art Deco gateway to the Pacific. Opened on May 27, 1937, it took four and a half years to build, a vote of confidence in the future cast in the depths of the Great Depression. Spanning the Golden Gate Strait, the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the bridge draws the eye, its two great towers, painted orange-vermilion, glowing in the sunset of a clear day or looming majestically out of the fog.
The bridge is something else, though: it is the world’s premier venue for suicide.
On average, a person jumps to his or her death from it every two weeks, more than 1,500 to date. And they are the ones who are known about. Others are thought to have taken the final leap only to be washed out into the ocean, their bodies never to be found, or recovered so far from the bridge that they cannot be classified as jumpers.
Amazingly, one in 50 jumpers survives the four-second plunge, equivalent to 25 storeys, some crippled for life but a few only slightly injured.
“There is a kind of allure to the bridge,” says John Bateson, former director of a crisis centre for the depressed and suicidal covering the Bay area. “There is a notoriety to be gained from jumping from the Golden Gate. For a brief period people receive an attention in death that may have been denied to them in life.”
Mr Bateson has made a study of the bridge and its siren attraction to those seeking an end to personal torment. In his book, The Final Leap, he explains how it attained its dark status and asks why no definitive action has been taken to stop people jumping. The solution, the erection of a high barrier or safety net, is obvious but has so far been thwarted.
“A lot of people in the Bay area would have no idea that the bridge has been the setting for such a huge number of suicides,” he says. “The people who run the bridge have no desire to publicise the reality of the situation.”
Joseph Strauss, the engineer in charge of building the bridge, declared in 1936: “The Golden Gate Bridge is practically suicide proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither possible nor probable.”
Strauss, who authorised a lower barrier than originally envisaged, lived just long enough to regret his words before dying of a heart attack in May 1938. By then, six people were known to have jumped, the first being Harold Wobber, a 47-year-old veteran of the Great War.
The death toll has varied over the years, from eight in 1957 to 42 in 1977, the year of the bridge’s 40th birthday. The deadliest year so far has been 1995, with 45 suicides.
Notes left behind suggest that most jumps are planned. “Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition,” wrote Stephen Hoag, 26. “Please forgive me,” wrote Marissa Imrie, 14. “Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/fea...suicide-Just-why-do-they-make-it-so-easy.html