The Final Leap by John Bateson Page A

its building and operating committee not to erect a suicide barrier on the bridge. Instead, directors voted to start foot and scooter patrols, allocating $76,736 for four temporary, part-time security officers who would be paid $14.50 per hour. The patrols, which began in April 1996, followed by two years the installation of thirteen emergency telephones on the bridge. The day the phones were installed, church bells rang throughout San Francisco and Mayor George Christopher proclaimed that they would save lives. Meanwhile, work began on a $402 million seismic retrofit of the bridge.
    The patrols proved effective in that they stopped one person per week from jumping. They didn’t stop everyone—twenty-three people jumped in 1996, and thirty-three in 1997. Still, with an annual budget of $93.8 million and a profit of $2.6 million in 1996, board members considered the patrols a good investment and voted to continue them; now at a cost of $110,000.
    A new push took place in 1998 after the total number of deaths exceeded twelve hundred. Bridge District officials approved testing of a high-tension, flexible wire fence stretching six feet above the current railing. Thin, vertical “z-clips” that were virtually impossible to separate would keep the fence in place. The criteria used in the Anshen & Allen study in 1970 hadn’t changed, however. In other words, the manufacturer had to design, develop, and test a prototype that “cannot cause safety or nuisance hazard to pedestrians or bridge personnel, must be totally effective as a barrier, cannot bar pedestrian traffic, weight cannot be beyond established allowable limits, cannot cause excessive maintenance problems, and aerodynamics cannot be beyond established allowable limits.”
    Z-Clip International Fencing Systems of Danville, California, was hired to create a prototype. The results, when unveiled, were unsatisfactory. On the plus side, the fence was lightweight yet also hard to cut. Simple wire cutters wouldn’t do it; a suicidal person would have to prepare in advance to carry bolt cutters. Also, it was designed so that the top wires were looser and curved back toward the walkway, making it difficult to surmount. On the negative side, many people considered the fence ugly and out of keeping with the bridge’s design. When a 125-foot-long test section was displayed near the toll plaza, critics complained that it looked like “the chicken-wire fences that enclose concentration camps.” An architectural review committee labeled it hideous, and an editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
said that installing the fence “would be an act of vandalism.… To add such a jerry-rigged monstrosity to the graceful span would be a grave insult to San Francisco’s landmark masterpiece.”
    From April to September 1998, the Bridge District received twenty-seven items of public correspondence about the fence. Sixteen were in favor. Martha Killebrew, whose daughter, Jane, jumped from the bridge in 1972, expressed the view of many victims’ families who said that any kind of barrier, regardless of appearance, was better than nothing. “To me, these wires are no more obtrusive than rear-window defrost lines in cars,” Killebrew said. “One just doesn’t think about them.”
    Eleven writers opposed the fence. One woman said that she moved from New York to California because New York “destroyed much of what was worthwhile” by having too many rules. “It is ironic that such a barrier intended to save lives actually makes life a little less worth living,” she concluded. Another woman wrote, “If and when I decide to die, I would prefer the bridge as an exit point, and I don’t want to be kept from it by a high, jail-like railing.”
    A man whose brother jumped four years earlier said that the bridge provided a useful service. His brother, he said, “had a clean death, involving no one