For the second year in a row, a Wallingford pastor will lead a group of people back and forth across the Aurora Bridge as part of a 24 hour prayer vigil. The vigil, set for October 8 and 9, is designed to bring attention to the problem of suicide jumpers.

Pastor Heath Rainwater, a Seattle firefighter who also leads the Vine Christian Ministries in Wallingford, started the “Take Back the Bridge Project” after responding to a suicide on the bridge. He was with the fire crews staging at the bottom of the bridge when he looked up and saw what was happening up top.

“I could see the young man. He was desperate,” Rainwater recently told KIRO-FM. “My heart wanted to be on top of the bridge saying something that could give him hope.”

WSDOT photo

Unfortunately, that young man jumped and died instantly. The “Take Back the Bridge Project” now helps raise money for the Crisis Clinic in Seattle which fields tens of thousands of calls a year. Rainwater says he also hopes the new suicide prevention fence currently being built across the Aurora Bridge will help.

“The reason why we’re so happy about the fence is it causes that separation of time for you to be able to get through that moment when you would impulsively jump and make a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” said Rainwater.

The 24 hour prayer vigil starts Friday, October 8 at 11am. That’s followed by a community march across the bridge on Saturday, October 9 at 12pm. Click here for more information or to register.

Just when you thought WSDOT was finally done with its work on the Aurora Bridge, it turns out crews found more rivets to remove. Crews found the rivets when they began repairing corroded steel portions of the bridge at 23 fence post locations.

Photo from WSDOT

It means more lane closures and planning for traffic delays if you’re using the bridge this weekend.

• On Saturday, Sept.25, two out of the three northbound lanes will be closed from 5:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.
• On Sunday, Sept. 26, two out of three northbound lanes will be closed from 5:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and again from 6 p.m. until midnight. Seahawks fans, WSDOT is giving you that window of opportunity to use all the lanes from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to accommodate post game traffic.

There are a total of 186 additional rivets that must be removed as part of the steel repair work. The rivets are located under the bridge in tight areas where access is difficult, requiring at least two more weekends to bust them out.

WSDOT can provide you with industrial strength earplugs if all this racket is causing too many sleepless nights. Call its 24-hour noise hotline, 206-440-4099, for more information.

The work is part of a WSDOT project to install an anti-suicide fence on the outer railing of the bridge. Work began in May.

Unfortunately, there was a recent suicide from the bridge on Sept. 11. One of our readers, Ryan Healy, who lives on 34th across the street from the Lake Washington Rowing Club, and has a view directly of the bridge and water beneath it, e-mailed us to let us know.

I heard her scream and looked up in time to see her hit the water with a loud and large splash. I called 911 and I thought I saw her swimming on the surface. A pleasure boater came to her rescue and pulled her on to the boat but she was motionless. After the police and fire crews arrived and were about finished I walked down near the Lake Washington Rowing Club dock to check on her condition. I asked a fire department official if she was going to be ok. His response was simple: “No.”

This is the second suicide I’ve seen in the past 5 months.

Seattle Police confirmed there was a successful suicide from the bridge that day at about the same time as our reader mentioned, about 1:15 p.m.

After three consecutive Sundays of rivet busting and lane closures on the Aurora Bridge, crews will take this Sunday off to keep traffic moving smoothly over the Labor Day weekend.  Rivet removal, along with the ”rivet buster” equipment, will pick up again on September 12.

Crews continue to work Monday through Thursday nights drilling holes for the suicide prevention fence across the bridge.

Photos from WSDOT

WSDOT’s work on the Aurora Bridge continues and drivers who plan on crossing it this Sunday could face closures, this time going both ways.

This Sunday crews will continue work to remove and replace more than 1000 rivets and bolts for the construction of a safety fence to deter suicides. Drivers can expect additional closures for rivet removal in September. Crews are working Sundays because rivet busting is too noisy to do at night. Nearby residents can expect to hear construction noise from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

• From 6 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 29, crews working for WSDOT will close two of three northbound lanes to remove and replace rivets on the east side of the bridge.
• From 1:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. all six lanes on the bridge and the southbound Fremont Way on-ramp will be closed while crews move construction equipment to the west side of the bridge. WSDOT scheduled this brief full closure at 1:30 p.m. to help southbound traffic heading to Sunday’s Mariners’ game.
• At 1:45 p.m. crews will reopen all northbound lanes and one southbound lane.
• Two southbound lanes and the southbound Fremont Way on-ramp will remain closed until midnight while crews work on the west side of the bridge.

If that’s not confusing enough, WSDOT has these suggestions on what to do to avoid closures and delays:

• Taking southbound SR 99 across the bridge before 1:30 p.m. Another option is using southbound SR 99 after 7:30 p.m., when delays caused by the closure will be very short.
• Taking northbound SR 99 across the bridge after 2:30 p.m. Drivers also should consider using northbound SR 99 in the morning before traffic volumes increase.
• Checking traffic conditions before hitting the roads. Check SR 99 traffic and I-5 traffic and tune into to radio traffic reports.

For the second Sunday in a row, the Washington State Department of Transportation crews will be closing lanes on the Aurora Bridge this weekend while crews work on the ‘rivet buster’ suicide fence. Commuters planning a trip downtown on Sunday should plan for delays or take an alternate route.

Photo from WSDOT’s Flickr page.

Crews will be working on the east side of the bridge, closing down two northbound lanes.

Access to northbound SR 99 from Halladay near Canlis will be open. Lane closures will be from 6 a.m. to midnight again, with the noisy work beginning as early as 7 p.m. and continuing until 11 p.m. Since they will be on the east side of the bridge, the sound will likely travel further into Lake Union this time.

WSDOT has been posting some pretty incredible photos of the work, which will continue through September 5, on its Flickr page. Check those out here.

Last night PI photographer Josh Trujillo, a former colleague of our Fremont Universe site editor Athima Chansanchai, saw a woman hop a rail on the Aurora Bridge in an attempt to jump. Josh called 911, and then began tweeting live about it, confronting the question of whether or not the media should cover suicides and attempts. Athima wrote,

Reading his tweets this morning, the story ends without tragedy at about 9:30 p.m.: “Good news. Young girl on Aurora Bridge is over the rail, back on the safe side. Police boats leaving from under bridge. Amen.”

His tweets about her began about 13 hours ago, about 7:30 p.m.: “No. A girl is on the Aurora Bridge about to jump. My heart is sinking. Police not here yet.”

I know Josh, so I know how sincere he is, so I don’t question how hard this must have been for him. This is a guy who was in the Army and deployed overseas before he was a photographer. He’s a consummate professional and he’s also a family man.

The irony is, the state is installing an anti-suicide fence on the bridge, and have been for a while.

While Josh was watching—and tweeting—as events unraveled, he witnessed another onlooker, a woman on the Fremont Bridge who said she’d been waiting in traffic for an hour, say loudly that the girl should “jump already.”

He also wrote that he felt “uncomfortable tweeting this one. This is awful.”

Another tweet: “FYI, I used to live under the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge. A jumper once landed in my yard. That was a terrible day. Hope today is better.”

Read Athima’s full story here. And tell us what you think about it.

After responding to complaints from neighbors about the late-night noise, Aurora Bridge construction crews have begun a new work schedule.

The first of four Sunday shifts, WSDOT crews resumed using the loud tool called the “Rivet Buster” yesterday to build the suicide fence along the bridge. But unlike last time, workers are avoiding the overnight hours.

Until midnight on Sunday, two of three southbound lanes on the bridge and the southbound Fremont Way N. on-ramp were closed to traffic.

“WSDOT engineers looked at weekday and weekend traffic volumes and determined that four 16-hour Sunday closures would allow crews to get the work done with the lowest overall noise and traffic effects,” explains WSDOT in a press release. “Four straight Sunday closures are critical to completing the fence project by the end of the year.”

Drivers can expect additional Sunday closures on Aug. 22 (northbound), Aug. 29 (half day each northbound and southbound), and Sept. 5 (northbound).

Even Nyquil won’t help you get your Zzzz’s if you live near the Aurora Bridge and you’ve heard it. By “it,” we mean that “loud as a monster woodpecker banging on a metal tree” sound that might have interrupted a few good nights’ rest.

It’s the latest development in the Aurora Bridge Fence Project (the anti-suicide barrier) from WSDOT. We’ll let them tell it:

A couple of weeks ago our contractor began using a tool called the Rivet Buster to remove rivets and bolts on the historic bridge. In many ways the Rivet Buster was a great tool. It was fast, efficient, safe and environmentally sound. But it was really loud. Can’t get any sleep loud.  So loud that some of your neighbors got up in the middle of the night to write us or call our 24-hour noise hotline (206-440-4099). And we listened.

As of this posting the Rivet Buster is on hiatus while we look into quieter ways to remove the rivets and bolts that meet our safety and environmental standards, and keep us on schedule. If those don’t pan out, the Rivet Buster will be on a 10 p.m. curfew.

Counter-intuitively, WSDOT says the work can’t be done during the day.

It comes down to safety and traffic. Workers need to close two lanes of the bridge to create a safe work zone. When two out of three lanes are closed at night, traffic can scoot by without many slowdowns. But if we closed two out of three lanes during the day, that could cause some lengthy backups on Aurora Avenue and send the spillover traffic over to Fremont and Dexter avenues.

It’s a delicate balancing act where one person’s cost is another person’s benefit. The bus rider that gets on the 358 at N. 46 St. wants to get to work on time. The person living under the bridge wants a good night’s sleep. The taxpayer wants the project to stay on budget. And the construction worker wants to come home safe. And yes, we really do think about how our decisions affect each of them.

They expect to have the work done by the end of this year or early 2011.

Construction on the Aurora Bridge “suicide fence” will finally begin tonight, Monday, May 24 after weeks of delays and postponements due to equipment problems – the month of noisy nighttime construction was supposed to begin back on April 19.

Beginning tonight and on Thursday, May 27 WSDOT will be closing the two northbound lanes and the northbound sidewalk across the Aurora Bridge from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. so that crews can install environmental safeguards and temporary construction lighting. From WSDOT:

• Some of this work will be noisy. When possible, we will shield noise sources to minimize the effects on those near the bridge. Please call (206.440.4099) or e-mail us and we will send free earplugs to your mailbox. Please include your name, address and the number of earplug sets you need.
• Earplugs are also available between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays at the Fremont Neighborhood Service Center located at 908 N. 34th Street.

WSDOT expects to finish work on the ‘suicide fence’ in late 2010 or early 2011. Read up on the project, see digital images of what the fence will look like and follow the project progress here.