Golden Gate Bridge (San-Francisco, USA)
The Golden Gate Bridge is also notorious as a place for committing suicides and is one of the most popular places for suicide jumpers in the world. The suicides are averaging one every two weeks.
For over seven decades of the bridge’s functioning according to unofficial accounts more than 1,200 people ended their lives by jumping off it (the official count stopped in 1995 when the number of suicide jumpers exceeded 1,000). The year of 1995 was a record-breaker (45 suicide jumpers — more, than in all three preceding years, from the time it was opened). There were 34 bridge-jump suicides in 2006 whose bodies were recovered, in addition to four jumps that were witnessed but whose bodies were never recovered, and several bodies recovered suspected to be from bridge jumps, though evidence was lacking. The California Highway Patrol removes 70 suicidal people from the bridge every year.
The accurate figure on the number of suicides is impossible to establish, because many were not witnessed (due to frequent fogs or because suicides were committed at night time). People have been known to travel to San Francisco specifically to jump off the bridge, and may take a bus or cab to the site; police sometimes find abandoned rental cars in the parking lot. Currents beneath the bridge are very strong, and some jumpers have undoubtedly been washed out to sea without ever being seen. The water may be as cold as 47 °F (8 °C) and great white sharks are sometimes observed under the bridge – they come here from Farallon Islands, where they congregate each fall.
775-meter fall from the bridge lasts four seconds. The body hits the water at the speed of 142 km/h, which is almost always fatal. Most of those who survive the initial impact generally die of internal injuries or cold water.
As of 2006, only 26 people are known to have survived the jump. All of them struck the water feet-first. Many of them sustained broken bones and numerous internal injuries. Only one person has ever been recorded as having made the jump without serious injury: in 1985 a 16-year-old wrestler landed on his buttocks and swam ashore; his first words reportedly were, “I can’t do anything right.” One young man survived a jump in 1979, swam to shore, and drove himself to a hospital. The impact cracked several of his vertebrae. A young woman from Piedmont, California, may be the only person to have jumped from the bridge twice. She survived the first jump in early 1988, but died in her second attempt later that year