Question of the Day - 09 December 2018

Completed in October 2010 at a cost of $240 million, the beautiful 1,900-foot-long Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge links Nevada and Arizona on US 93 (someday to become I-11). Just downstream from and with a fabulous view of Hoover Dam, it’s 920 feet above Black Canyon of the Colorado River. As such, it’s the second-highest bridge in the nation (the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado is 955 feet high). It’s also the longest bridge of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

The Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge was suicide free for its first 18 months. The first confirmed suicide took place in April 2012 (a 60-year-old San Jose woman). The second occurred just a month later when a young Arizona man jumped to his death. The third person committed suicide in July 2012, when a 39-year-old North Las Vegas man took the leap after Hoover Dam and Las Vegas Metro police spent two hours trying to dissuade him. In that same month, an unidentified woman also went over the railing.

Then, in January 2014, another unidentified woman who looked to be in her late 30s and dressed all in black was photographed by a Boulder City woman taking a picture of the sunset behind her — just before she disappeared over the edge. She'd taken a taxi from Arizona. 

As far as we can tell, these are the only five recorded suicides from the bridge; we couldn’t find any over the past four years.

Although authorities discussed the possibility of erecting a suicide barrier during construction of the bridge, they decided that such precautions wouldn’t prevent anyone determined to commit suicide. For one, Hoover Dam has also been something of a magnet for jumpers; we’ve seen numbers from 20 up to 100 since the dam was completed and open to tours in 1936. (By comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay opened a year after the dam in 1937 and more than 1,600 documented deaths have been recorded; undocumented suicides are probably much higher. Niagara Falls sees 20 suicides annually.)   

On the other hand, since preventive measures, such as security cameras, bike patrols, and suicide-hotline phones, were installed at the Golden Gate, suicide numbers have been greatly reduced.

In addition, other suicide sites like the Empire State Building, Sydney Harbor Bridge, the (Paris) Eiffel Tower, and Japan’s Mt. Mihara volcano have installed barriers to jumpers, resulting in similarly dramatic reductions in suicides.

Finally, a behavioral scientist at UC Berkeley surveyed 500 potential jumpers who were pulled away from the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge and found that 470 of them (94%) were still alive, or died of other causes, 30 years later. In addition, he followed 30 people who jumped and survived, only three of whom later took their lives.