San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is a globally renowned tourist attraction, but it is also a famous suicide site. The $217 million suicide net project on the Golden Gate Bridge, which took more than five years and cost more than five years, is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
According to reports, plans for suicide netting on the Golden Gate Bridge were approved in 2014, and in 2018 the engineering team began installing protective netting on both sides of the bridge, which is about 2.7 kilometers long. The work, originally scheduled for completion in 2021, was delayed by two years due to staff and main contractor changes.
The protective net is about 6 meters wide and is fixed about 6 meters under the sidewalk of the Golden Gate Bridge by 369 metal brackets, which are about 15 meters apart. A reporter from China News Service observed on Friday local time that it was difficult for passers-by in the distance to find the protective net of the same color as the bridge, but on the sidewalk of the bridge, many tourists noticed the device and took out their mobile phones to take pictures.
Although the safety net is not yet complete, it has begun to work in recent years. Over the past 10 years, there have been an average of 33.5 suicide deaths per year on the bridge, according to the Golden Gate Bridge administration.
The Bridge Guardrail Foundation, a nonprofit organization, has been working to install guardrails on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicide. According to the group, 22 suicides were confirmed at the Golden Gate Bridge last year and 13 in the first 10 months of this year.
According to statistics, since the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, nearly 1,800 people have chosen to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge, while fewer than 40 people are known to have survived. Almost all of the survivors made it clear that they regretted it from the moment they jumped.
In 1978, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, tracked 515 suicides who were successfully dissuaded on the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971 and found that 94 percent were still alive or died of natural causes.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted in a report released Wednesday that the number of suicides in the United States has been on the rise overall since the beginning of the 21st century. Last year, the number of suicides in the United States reached a record high of 49,449. That means 14.3 per 100,000 Americans die by suicide, the highest suicide rate since 1941.