A long-awaited suicide prevention barrier at the Golden Gate Bridge has been completed, officials announced on Wednesday, marking the culmination of a tireless campaign by families who lost loved ones at the famous structure.
Crews had been working to finish installing stainless steel nets on both sides of the bridge before a promised 2024 deadline.
“We are pleased to announce that, as of January 1, 2024, the Golden Gate Bridge now has a continuous physical suicide barrier installed the full length of the 1.7-mile span,” said Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, the public affairs director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, the entity that oversees the structure.
“The net is already working as intended to save lives and deter people from coming to the bridge to harm themselves.”
Cosulich-Schwartz said the suicide deterrent system, also known as “the net”, has been installed across 95% of the bridge. Due to construction and design constraints, some parts of the bridge have vertical fencing in place of or in addition to the net, he added.
The completion of the barrier comes nearly a decade after the project was first approved. Work began in 2018 but faced numerous construction delays, as well as resistance from people who did not want to alter the landmark or considered the installation too costly.
Those who fought for more safety measures have said the net was long overdue; the Golden Gate Bridge has long been known as one of the deadliest suicide locations in the world.
Heather Quisenberry, who lost her son to suicide at the bridge, described the completion as bittersweet. “On the one hand, I’m grateful that the net that we fought for, for so long will be complete and that it will stop future suicides from happening on that bridge,” she said. “But on the other hand, if some suicide deterrent had been installed sooner, my son and others may have not had to die.”
Kevin Hines regretted jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge the moment his hands released the rail. Hines, who has bipolar disorder, was 19 at the time, in September 2000, and miraculously survived.
“Had the net been there, I would have been stopped by the police and gotten the help I needed immediately and never broken my back, never shattered three vertebrae, and never been on this path I was on,” Hines, now a suicide-prevention advocate, told the Associated Press. “I’m so grateful that a small group of like-minded people never gave up on something so important.”
Calls to do something about the suicides began years ago, but it was a small group of parents, including Hines’s father, Patrick, who formed the Bridge Rail Foundation in 2006 and got the job done.
The group originally advocated for raising the height of the bridge’s railing, a proposal that faced opposition because it would have blocked the sweeping views of the bay. Later they advocated for a suicide net based on the success of similar installations in places like Bern, Switzerland.
Ken Holmes, a former coroner in Marin county who joined the Bridge Rail Foundation after realizing how frequently suicides occurred at the bridge, celebrated the net’s completion.
“I am very happy that it’s coming to an end,” Holmes said on Wednesday. “I also understand that this is a deterrent and it’s not going to be the end of all barriers, but certainly it will deter most people from even going to the bridge. And that has been our goal all along.”
The nets – placed 20ft (6 metres) down from the bridge’s deck – are not visible from cars crossing the bridge. But pedestrians standing by the rails can see them. They were built with marine-grade stainless steel, which can withstand the harsh environment that includes saltwater, fog and strong winds that often envelop the striking orange structure at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay.
The barriers are already working as hoped, Cosulich-Schwartz said: as the project neared completion in 2023, the number of people who jumped fell by more than half.
The nets are meant to deter people from jumping and to curb the death rate of those who still attempt to jump, though they will likely be badly injured.
“It’s stainless-steel wire rope netting, so it’s like jumping into a cheese grater,” Dennis Mulligan, the general manager of the bridge district, told the Associated Press. “It’s not soft. It’s not rubber. It doesn’t stretch. We want folks to know that if you come here, it will hurt if you jump.”
Firefighters in both San Francisco and Marin counties are being trained to climb down and rescue anyone who jumps into the nets. For now, ironworkers who maintain the bridge and are trained in rescue techniques perform rescues. On the deck, members of a bridge patrol work to spot people considering suicide and to prevent them from jumping. Last year, they dissuaded 149 people from jumping, Mulligan said.
The net was approved by the bridge district in 2014 for $76m, but construction costs rose to $224m, Mulligan said. Critics of the project complained that a lot of money was being spent on deterring people who, they claimed, were determined to end their lives.
Supporters of the nets, including the Bridge Rail Foundation, point to studies by Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley that show that most survivors do not try to kill themselves again. They say stopping easy access to lethal means is crucial to preventing suicides.
Dayna Whitmer, whose son, Matthew, jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2007, said she believes her son, whose body was never recovered, would have been deterred by the nets.
“A lot of people, when they’re that focused on a method, they don’t see anything else around them,” she told the AP. “And if they get to that point where they can’t do it, they kind of just throw their hands up and sort of walk away. And I’m thinking that’s something he would have done.”
A commemoration ceremony to mark the completion of the net is expected to take place in April.
The Associated Press contributed reporting