On Jan 28, 5:47�am, Harry Krause wrote:
Posted on Sun, Jan. 28, 2007 * *

Suicide jumpers alarm Seattle office workers

The Associated Press

SEATTLE - A bridge over Seattle is becoming hazardous to the mental
health of the dot-com employees and other office workers below, who keep
seeing people jump to their deaths from the span.

Thirty-nine people over the past decade have committed suicide off the
155-foot-high Aurora Bridge - eight in 2006 alone - and counselors are
regularly brought in to help office workers deal with the shock of
seeing the leap or the bloody aftermath.

At least one woman, Sarah Edwards, drives on the left side of the street
near her office ever since a body landed on the hood of a co-worker's car.

City and state officials, meanwhile, are adding suicide-prevention signs
and telephones in hopes of reducing the death toll.

The "suicide bridge," as the half-mile span has been occasionally called
since it was built in 1931, carries as many as 45,000 vehicles a day on
one of the main north-south highways through Seattle, passing over a
narrow channel connecting Lake Washington and Lake Union.

Some jumpers hit the water; others land on the pavement or other solid
ground. Either way, they almost always die. (One person is said to have
survived after landing in the water.)

The neighborhood beneath the bridge used to be docks and warehouses, and
the suicides went largely unnoticed. But during the technology boom of
the past two decades, it morphed into a trendy area full of office
buildings, shops and restaurants, and the bodies began to fall where
people could see them.

"They end up in our parking lot," said Katie Scharer, one of Edwards'
co-workers at Cutter & Buck, a sportswear company based in the Adobe
complex. "Nobody's ever totally used to it."

- - -

Maybe a day of sunshine up there might help raise the spirits of the
jumpers?

It's been sunny for the past three days. Maybe that explains why there
haven't been any suicides off the Aurora Bridge.

According to this link, less than 50 of about 2500 suicides that
occured in this county over a 15 year span involved jumping from the
bridge.

http://www.urbanarchives.org/projects/JonathanMoore.pdf


Must have been a slow news day at the Times.


When that bridge was built, back duing the depression, there were
still tall ships in Seattle's Lake Union. They had to be towed out
before the two ends of the bridge came together, and nearly every
waterfront office around here has a black and white shot of the
"Monongahela" being towed through the narrow gap between the north and
south ends of the bridge days before it the span was finished. It
gives you an appreciation for the height of the masts and rigging on
some of those ships to see that the tips of the masts would indeed
have been too high to clear the finished bridge.

Most were towed over to Banibridge Island, where they were eventually
burned to recover the iron fittings.