Sweeping gracefully across ocean and sky, supported by 30 arch-shaped towers, the Coronado bridge is one of San Diego County’s most iconic structures. And among its deadliest.

Since its opening in 1969, about 300 people have committed suicide there, tragedies that ripple through families and friends, those who witness the fatal 200-foot jumps, and those who recover the bodies.

Hundreds of other people over the years have gone to the bridge to die and changed their minds or been grabbed before they could go over the side. Suicide-related traffic delays are a regular occurrence for those who live or work on Coronado.

All of which is prompting a group of local residents to explore whether it’s feasible to put some kind of barrier on the bridge that will deter people from leaping off it.

“It feels irresponsible not to at least take a look at the possibilities,” said Jennifer Lewis, a college professor and co-founder of the Coronado Bridge Collaborative, which includes nurses, mental-health professionals and relatives of people who have committed suicide off the bridge.

Would you support a barrier to prevent suicides on the San Diego-Coronado Bridge? Yes 43% (602) No 57% (812) 1414 total votes.

They’ve been sharing notes with a similar group in San Francisco that pushed through a $76 million plan to put a net on the Golden Gate Bridge, the most frequently used spot for suicides in the world. More than 1,600 have died there since it opened in 1937.

Approval in San Francisco came after decades of debate about whether a barrier would be effective, whether it would mar the beauty of the bridge, and whether it would be worth the money. The net, 20 feet below the bridge and painted in the familiar International Orange, is expected to be in place by 2019.

Lewis said her group anticipates similar debates here. They’ve already met with the Coronado City Council, winning an endorsement to explore the barrier idea. They’ve met with Caltrans, which owns the bridge and at this point has no plans to modify it, according to a spokesman.

Lewis said the group wants to do a feasibility study, which would probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s exploring a grant with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to use Coronado as a test site for developing a protocol that could be used by other communities interested in barriers.

There’s a particular urgency in San Diego County, where suicide-prevention specialists have been working to understand and reverse a trend that has seen the rate of suicide here outpace both state and national averages.

Last year, 420 people killed themselves in the county. Sixteen jumped from the bridge.

Why bridges?

Dr. Mel Blaustein is a psychiatrist in San Francisco and co-author of a 2009 American Journal of Psychiatry paper about suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge.

He said iconic bridges can become “suicide magnets” for several reasons. One is that the bridges are easily accessible. Another is that they are often in beautiful surroundings. “There’s a lot of romanticism,” he said.

And there’s also a misconception that falling into water will be a clean, painless death, he said. (In fact, falling 200 feet means you’ll be traveling about 75 mph at impact.)

Blaustein works at a hospital in San Francisco and has interviewed dozens of people who either threatened or tried to kill themselves by jumping off the bridge. He said the most persistent “myth” about bridge suicides is that people turned away by a barrier will simply go somewhere else and jump.

“That’s not what happens,” he said.

He pointed to a study done by Richard Seiden, a now-retired professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Seiden tracked 515 people who had been stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge between 1937 and 1971.

By 1978, he found, 94 percent were either still alive or had died from natural causes. Six percent had committed suicide or died in accidents that might have been suicides.

“Once the impulse is gone, they often don’t go on to harm themselves,” Blaustein said.

More recently, researchers in Australia analyzed nine studies done on the effectiveness of suicide barriers at bridges and cliffs in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Washington, D.C., Maine, Switzerland, and Canada.

They concluded that there was an 86 percent reduction in suicides at the various sites. Suicides by jumping increased 44 percent at nearby sites, but overall, there was a 28 percent reduction in all jumping suicides in the cities studied, according to the report, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2013.

Suicide Prevention Resources San Diego Access & Crisis Line, 888-724-7240 It’s Up to Us San Diego, up2SD.org American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, afsp.org National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255

Bridge barriers fit into a broader strategy – “reducing access to lethal means” – that has been adopted by agencies trying to combat suicide. Research shows that people planning to kill themselves often have settled on a specific manner and place. If either is disrupted, the person may delay trying, and in that delay might get help.

“It’s one of the things that we know works,” said Carolyn Skiljan, co-chair of the San Diego County Suicide Prevention Council.

When England stopping using coal-gas for cooking (deadly if breathed in enclosed spaces), the suicide rate dropped 25 percent. When Sri Lanka banned the use of a half-dozen pesticides (fatal if ingested), suicides fell 50 percent in 10 years.

“If you restrict the access, you’ll have fewer suicides,” Blaustein said.

He’s still haunted by the story of one person who left a note on the ground before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. “Why,” the note read, “do you make it so easy?”

Feasibility study

The first fatal plummet off the Coronado bridge was in 1972, and it wasn’t a suicide. Jewel Hutchings, 52, was forced to jump at gunpoint by her husband, who was convicted of manslaughter.

Since then, there have been about 300 suicides, according to figures from the county Medical Examiner’s office compiled by the Coronado collaborative. From 2000 through 2014, there have been 66.

“When you live over here, you’re attuned to how often it seems to be happening,” said Lewis, the group’s co-founder. “It feels like there are two people on the bridge every week.”

This isn’t the first time someone has proposed some kind of barrier, but the idea has never gotten far. Edward Cartagena, a Caltrans spokesman, said, “There are no plans to study any kind of suicide-prevention measures for the Coronado bridge.”

However, he also pointed to what happened in San Francisco, where the Bridge Rail Foundation spearheaded the campaign for the Golden Gate Bridge. “If we are presented with information as part of a feasibility study, we would be happy to take a look at it,” Cartagena said.

Such a study would explore, for example, whether the bridge is strong enough to support the additional weight of a fence on top of the current 34-inch-high barrier. Or whether a net would interfere with Navy ships passing underneath.

In San Francisco, more than a dozen alternatives were considered before a net was chosen. It will be 20 feet below the roadway, and extend out 20 feet over the water. The net will be stainless steel cable that collapses slightly, and will be angled to make crawling out of it difficult.

The project is patterned after a similar setup at the Muenster terrace, part of a Medieval cathedral in Bern, Switzerland. In the late 1990s, to deter suicides there, a net was installed. No one has jumped since.

Paul Muller, president of the Bridge Rail Foundation, said if someone goes off the Golden Gate Bridge, the 20-foot fall will probably incapacitate the jumper – dislocate a shoulder, break an ankle. A specially trained fire rescue crew will pull them from the net.

Other bridges in California have been modified with fences. Three years ago, Caltrans put a $3 million fence that’s almost 10 feet high on the Cold Spring Canyon Bridge in Santa Barbara County, where more than 50 people had committed suicide. There have been two apparent suicides there since (neither was witnessed) and officials aren’t sure how they got around or over the barrier.

Lewis said it’s soon early to know what kind of modification, if any, would work on the Coronado bridge, or whether there will be community support for it.

“If a barrier isn’t feasible, we will move on to something else,” she said. “The problem isn’t going away.”