The facts
- Roughly one person every two weeks jumps from the bridge.
- Around 1,300 people are known to have died there since its 1937 opening.
- Many more have probably also ended their lives in the waters below unnoticed.
- During the four seconds it takes to reach the water, fallers reach a velocity of 120 miles an hour. The impact almost always kills them – and if it doesn't they generally drown anyway.
"The Golden Gate Bridge," as one writer of a suicide manual put it, "Is to suicides what Niagara Falls is to honeymooners."
Spurred on by these stark facts and an article in the New Yorker calling for the erection of a barrier around the bridges walkway to prevent further deaths, filmmaker Eric Steel spent most of 2004 with cameras trained on the bridge to pick out any potential suicides.
Established in 1995,
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