The George Clinton Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge is high enough that if you lean out over the railing and look down, a queasy sensation will start up in the back of your legs.
With a drop of 152 feet, if one fell over the railing, approximately three seconds would pass before hitting the water—enough time to reach a free-falling speed of 66 miles per hour. Entering the water at that velocity, the water molecules are unlikely to be displaced fast enough. The surface tension of the water will feel rock-solid.
“Anytime there’s a call for someone either about to jump or having jumped off the bridge, we dispatch our marine unit,” said Ulster County Undersheriff James Mullen. “We do try to go out as soon as we can, because we really want to be a rescue team, but obviously off that bridge that usually doesn’t happen.”
During two incidents less than a week apart, two individuals, identities withheld, jumped off the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, with the intention, it may be assumed, of ending their own lives. A woman jumped on Aug. 18, a man on Aug. 21.
Agencies alerted that a bridge jumper has jumped are called into action as rescue teams but most frequently end as search and recovery teams.
The Ulster County Sheriff’s Office dive team is made up of members from the road patrol, the corrections division, and, since last year, has accepted divers from other municipal police departments, such as the Town of Lloyd and the Town of New Paltz. The dive team is usually dispatched with the Town of Ulster and Ulster Hose Fire Department.
The Sheriff’s Office marine unit has the use of a 36-foot-long welded aluminum-hull Munson boat, which is able to come aground on the beach if need be.
When no rescue is possible, it’s the job of the first responders to recover the body.
In the case of the unidentified woman, the dive team was not required. Her body was recovered close to the shore, near Charles Rider Park in the Town of Ulster. But to locate the man’s body, the dive team was required to dive.
“We used to have to just put a diver in, in the area of where we thought the body was,” Mullen said, “and it would be hours and hours of diving before we found anything. But now we have this technology that allows us to get a picture of what’s down there.”
Using a type of side-scan sonar operated from onboard the Sheriff’s Office Munson boat, they can bounce signals down to the river bottom to search for where a body may have ended up. When they find a suggestive shape, into the drink a diver goes. The conditions can be challenging.
“Most divers are certified to 60 feet, but once you’re in the water you can’t even see your hand in front of your face,” Mullen said. “What we do is sink a weighted line down to the river bottom where we think the body is, and then the diver hooks onto that rope and goes straight down to the source, and it saves time.”
Dive team leader Joe Steyer, who responded to the most recent call, estimates where the diver found the body was about 22 feet down, and all told, the diver only spent 15 minutes in the water. When the body is located, the diver swims up cradling the body, which, because of buoyancy, doesn’t seem to weigh as much as it will when taken out of the water.
“Once he got to the surface, we zipped him into a bag and fastened him to the bow. The conditions were rough, but once you’re underwater…” Steyer shrugs.
Sometimes the divers are searching closer to shore and a tender works with the diver, attached to one another by a rope. The rope has communication lines running through it.
“This way the diver can communicate with the tender on land and can say, you know, this is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m feeling,” Mullen said. “Especially in the Hudson River, the current can be really strong.”
Guiding the search from above, the tender gauges where the diver’s bubbles appear and tries to keep the diver searching in a grid pattern along the bottom of the river until a body is recovered.
Unfortunately, scenes like these play out every year underneath every bridge in the Mid-Hudson Valley region, where there are five spans connecting the east and west riverbanks: the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, connecting Greene County with Columbia County; the parallel spans of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, connecting Orange County with Dutchess County; the Mid-Hudson Bridge and the Governor Clinton Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, both connecting Dutchess to Ulster County; and the Bear Mountain Bridge, which connects Putnam to Rockland County.
Over a 17-year period, from 2007 until May 24, 2024, 146 individuals attempted suicide by jumping off one of these bridges in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Forty-three of these individuals survived.
Mullen could recall that some jumpers in the past had survived their leap, but that outcome was so infrequent he couldn’t provide an example.
At the beginning of summer, down between Poughkeepsie and Highland, there was a jumper who did survive after leaping off the Mid-Hudson Bridge. Police from the Town of Lloyd had been alerted by a 911 dispatcher about a man who was contemplating the 135-foot drop.
When police arrived, they attempted to talk the man down. Instead, they witnessed him jump over the side.
City of Poughkeepsie firefighters launched their jet boat, Marine Two, located the man drifting southward with the tide, and fished him out of the water. The man resented being saved.
A state trooper present at the time of the incident, who agreed to speak on background, remembered: “We didn’t pull him out of the water. City of Poughkeepsie Fire, I think, pulled him out. And then I helped him off the boat into the ambulance.”
Surprisingly, the man had only suffered bruising. The state trooper recalled the man being very out of it. He suspected drugs.
That bridges act as a magnet for a particular breed of emotionally disturbed person, uniquely vulnerable to the lure which heights present, the New York State Bridge Authority knows only too well.
In 2007, the authority reached out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for data that could be used to compile a comprehensive report and inform prevention strategies.
Signage, suicide crisis call boxes, fencing, nets, closing the bridges to pedestrians entirely— all possible solutions were weighed by the authority.
Call boxes have proven to be the most effective tool for preventing deaths, according to a study by the bridge authority, and their upkeep costs are manageable.
“Preventing suicides on bridges will most likely occur if we recognize the situation for what it is: a mental health problem,” the report asserted. “By partnering with mental health professionals who know how to assess, refer and treat those in danger of self-harm, transportation agencies can do their job and allow these professionals to construct a ‘human barrier’ that will outperform any physical barrier and save more lives.”
Maintaining a human connection with a suicidal individual is the best way to ensure that person’s survival, the study posited. A voice in the darkness. Someone to talk to until the impulse to die passes on like some kind of fast-moving thundercloud.
But there are those who insist that a physical barrier is exactly what’s required to prevent an impulsive decision.
Ulster County Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced last year by state Sen. Pete Harckham, whose district includes the Bear Mountain Bridge. Wishing to see climb-deterrent fencing built on all bridge authority–owned bridges, the bill passed the Senate but remains in the Assembly Transportation Committee.
In San Francisco, the suicide-by-bridge-jumping capital of the world, the Golden Gate Bridge authority finally caved in 2023 and installed jump netting below the deck of the bridge. Bridge jumpers still try, and some who land on the netting climb out to the edge and succeed in getting past it before they can be rescued, but the thinking goes that every step which slows down the purpose of a bridge jumper could produce a positive outcome.
Consulted by the bridge authority, bridge engineers Modjeski and Masters produced a study in 2022 demonstrating the costs of adding climb-deterrent fencing across all six of its bridges.
Where mesh netting or horizontal wire fencing would cost upward of $90 million each, chain-link fencing could be built for a relative song—$21.5 million. Steel picket fencing is the most expensive option, at $122.2 million.
If it was expected to pay for the fencing on its own, the cost would be considered prohibitive. In 2024, the New York State Bridge Authority reported just $82.5 million in total revenue, even as it collected tolls from a record 64.4 million drivers crossing its bridges.
Assuming the authority did install the fencing, as it notes in its 2007 report, “there is no 100 percent sure way to prevent suicide attempts at bridges.”
Even after forking over $90 million for horizontal wire fencing, a motivated bridge jumper could simply climb the wires—a downside the authority recognized in its report.
Or they could walk to where there is no fencing and jump there.
Following the two suicides from the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, just a week passed when, on Aug. 27, an unidentified man climbed over the 4-foot-6-inch railing on the Walkway Over the Hudson, a train trestle converted for pedestrian and bicycle use suspended 212 feet in the air. The man jumped over land to meet his death among the brick and concrete below.
The time to think, as encouraged by a fence, and the human contact provided by a suicide prevention crisis hotline phone, appear together to be the best solutions bridge operators have found so far in reducing the annual number of bridge-jumping tragedies.
Then again, there were 64.4 million drivers who drove their vehicles across those bridges without getting out of their car and jumping off—ditto the tens of thousands of bicyclists or pedestrians who cross the bridges every year. Ruining a breathtaking view for the majority by providing for an emotionally disturbed minority can be interpreted as an excess of caution.
Walking along a natural cliff at Cape Split Provincial Park in Nova Scotia, there are no railings in sight. Signs are posted every so often reading: Safety is your responsibility.
So it is that the electronic signage giving positive reinforcement on the sides of the bridges, which say things like “Life is worth it,” or “You’re not alone,” may miss the bull’s-eye.
As long as enough compassionate people continue to stand at the ready, answering the crisis hotline or arriving at a bridge by police cruiser, fire engine or ambulance to talk troubled souls back from the edge, there is hope. Even by rescue boat.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, help is available. In Ulster County, the 24/7 Mobile Mental Health Team can be reached at (844) 277-4820. You can also dial or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or reach out to Family of Woodstock’s hotline at (845) 338-2370 for immediate local support.
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