Weekend Would-Be Jumper on the Ellington Bridge
Every day lots of people cross the Duke Ellington Bridge between Adams Morgan and Woodley Park. My husband, for example, has done so basically every day of his life for the past 11 years. It wasn’t until Saturday, though, that he saw someone try to jump off.
While walking to the Marriott Wardman Park to Twitter, blog, and otherwise write about all of Saturday’s excitement, he watched someone yank his car to a stop right in the middle of the bridge. That’s odd, he said (paraphrasing here. I was in bed), and then he watched the driver sprint to the opposite side of the bridge and forcibly grab hold of another man’s leg. Shortly thereafter another man grabbed his other leg and the first man yelled: “Someone call 911.” Which my husband did. The dispatcher (paraphrasing again) said, “Well, do you have him?” They did; the samaritans said they needed no more samaritans, just the cops.
The incident reminded me of “Jumpers,” a story that ran a few years back in the New Yorker and describes what happens when a jumper jumps, in this case off the Golden Gate Bridge:
In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.
The Ellington bridge is one of the few “suicide bridges” in the country that has barriers designed specifically to prevent the eggbeater treatment of a person’s organs. In this case, I think it worked.
11 Responses to “Weekend Would-Be Jumper on the Ellington Bridge”
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June 2nd, 2008 at 3:25 pm
I seem to remember, in the ’80s, those barriers weren’t as tall and jumper-proof. And maybe this is your basic false-memory-syndrome talking, but didn’t that bridge have a couple of suicide helpline telephone boxes at about the middle of the sidewalk? Granted my memory is suspect, but that’s a clear enough vision to trust….
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I don’t recall the helplines but I have seen pictures of a jumper who made it over. It’s not pretty.
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I saw the police with this guy up against the railing on Saturday morning. I thought, “Huh, that guy must have tried to jump.” And it was a really unsettling realization.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:02 pm
There was a lot of controversy with the installation of the extended rails. Some thought the look detracted too much from the original intent/design of the bridge. others thought the suicide prevention aspects were too important.
I wonder just how many lives have been saved over the years?
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
There were suicide hotline phones in the early ’80’s on either the Ellington Bridge or the nearby Connecticut Ave. [Taft] bridge. I can’t recall which, but one of the two had a serious reputation as a ’suicide bridge’ back in the day…at least among us local junior high kids.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
That would have been Ellington.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:38 am
Pretty sure we did a story on the hotline phones (late 80’s) and they were on the Taft. Please don’t make me go find that photo.
Anyone know why no barriers on the Taft? It seems just as dangerous if one were so inclined
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
My recollection is that the suicide hotlines were on the Taft Bridge, not the Ellington, but I could be wrong.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I read that the Taft bridge, despite being every bit as effective as a suicide bridge, just doesn’t inspire people to jump. The Ellington Bridge does. The barriers have been very effective in preventing people from jumping. This is one of the arguments for adding barriers to the Golden Gate.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:58 am
It’s gotta be the tree canopy on Taft. You look down, you see leaves five feet away from you. Not very “goodbye cruel world” inspiring.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:42 am
That particular bridge has been a jumping-off point since it was built. Before it was re-christened the Duke Ellington bridge, it was known as the Calvert Street bridge. When we (as kids) would whine about our horrible (not) lives, my dad would say, “Well, why don’t you just go jump off the Calvert Street bridge?”