Water Animal: 3/9/08

Friday, March 14, 2008

If you're an ironworker on the Golden Gate Bridge and your home phone rings at 3 a.m., you know it's trouble.

You know someone is threatening to jump off your bridge. Your stuff is always ready; you're out the door in minutes.

If you aren't too late, if you climb out onto the cold steel and sweet-talk some poor lost soul off the beam or tower or manage to wrestle him or her to safety, it's a good feeling. Many suicide attempts are impulsive; lives can be salvaged.

If you fail, if the person jumps into that bottomless fog, it ruins your day.

"There's no describing how helpless you feel," says Ken Hopper, a Golden Gate Bridge ironworker for 17 years.

These ironworkers are tough guys. Men of Steel, they're called. Cowboys in the Sky. They fix and maintain the world's most amazing Tinkertoy.

But what qualifies these blue-collar rivet-wrestlers to perform the delicate psychological task of suicide prevention? Just this: There's nobody else.

"We're the only ones dumb enough to do it," Hopper says.

they should pay us samantha

feel free to drive drunk in seattle Metropolitan King County Councilmember Jane Hague does. why not you?

blood-alcohol readings taken at the time of the arrest couldn't be admitted as evidence during a trial...because they failed to notify her...that she might lose her licence if she was proven drunk...wow. 100 percent corruption. you mean she didn't know that evidence in a blood test could be used to show she was drunk? and driving with a blood alcohol content of .20 might cause her to lose her licence. impeach jane hague.

.Eastside News | Hague gets 6 months probation for DUI | Seattle Times Newspaper: "Metropolitan King County Councilmember Jane Hague"