.8,2WEST TISBURY, Mass. - Tragedy and the Brooklyn Bridge are old companions. For all the magnificent service and lift to the soul that the majestic structure has been providing for nearly a century, its toll in human life has been high.

Thirty, possibly 40 lives were lost building it, including that of its creative genius, John A. Roebling. The week it opened, in May 1883, a dozen peoples were trampled to death when a throng of holiday strollers on the pedestrian promenade suddenly panicked, in fear that the span was giving way. Since then, ironworkers and painters have been killed in accidental falls and a score of others have leaped to their end.

But never was the bridge itself at fault. Not until the death last week of a Japanese photographer, Akira Aimi, has the Brooklyn Bridge reached out and taken a life. This very different kind of tragedy doesn't merely raise questions about the bridge and those who are supposed to be looking after it but rather could foreshadow other such tragedies unless something is done.

There is, it should be said at once, nothing outdated or inadequate about the Brooklyn Bridge. It is the best-built bridge in New York, and over the years has given the engineers in charge less trouble than any bridge in the city. Indeed, it remains today one of the best-built bridges in the world. Its four main cables are so strong that if sufficient force could be put on them, they could actually uproot the massive granite anchorages on shore to which they are fixed. Yet the roadway and its superstructure - the bridge proper, which is suspended from the main cables - is so solidly built that if all four cables were to break, the bridge itself still would not fall.