The Port Authority is planning to construct a 9-foot “suicide fence” on the George Washington Bridge at a cost of nearly $50 million to stop the spate of jumpers.
The fence won’t be completed until 2022 and is part of a larger, $1 billion project to refurbish the bridge’s suspension cables and walkways, said Steve Coleman, a PA spokesman.
The agency hopes to, “minimize jumping attempts from the bridge’s walkway as part of the approved suspender-rope replacement project. Installation of the fence will be done as improvements are made to the walkway’s pedestrian and bicyclist access areas,” Coleman said.
The number of suicides from the span once averaged about six annually, but it has gone up in recent years, officials said.
So far this year, there have been 13 suicides, a number on pace to eclipse the record 18 in 2012. That year, 43 others tried but failed to take their lives at the bridge.
Last year, the number of suicides dropped to 16, with 37 other deaths being averted, officials said.
Coleman insisted that the agency had been taking more proactive measures to stanch the surge of suicides.
“The Port Authority has stepped up police patrols, added surveillance cameras and installed hot-line phones at the George Washington Bridge in recent years to help address the issue of bridge suicides, preventing more than 75 deaths since the beginning of last year,” Coleman noted.
He noted that the new fence is “still in the design stage.”
He said it must “preserve the bridge’s engineering integrity” and “also be difficult to climb.”
Plans call for the north walkway, or the side that faces the Hudson Valley, to be built first.
The south walkway, which faces Manhattan, will be constructed after the first side is done, Coleman said.
In September 2010, Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers student, jumped to his death from the bridge after a roommate filmed him in an intimate encounter with another man.