To reach a suicide prevention hotline, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
The state is planning to start work this summer installing suicide prevention fencing on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, although it’s not clear how long the project could take to complete.
The Maine Department of Transportation is planning to put the $2 million project out to bid by the end of March, according to department spokesperson Paul Merrill. He said fencing cannot be installed until after an ongoing project to replace lighting on the bridge, which should wrap up in April.
Merrill did not immediately respond to a followup question Wednesday about how long the project will take.
Stephanie Cossette, an Eddington resident whose son died by suicide by jumping from the bridge in 2013, said she’s long supported installation of suicide prevention fencing along the span. She said she is eager for work to begin on the project, so that other people might not lose their loved ones.
“I’m afraid the longer it takes, if there are construction delays and maybe a change of governor, it could take five or 10 years,” Cossette said. “It’s a big deal to me.”
Gov. Janet Mills was re-elected in 2022 and is expected to remain in office until the end of 2026.
The project’s expected start follows the final stages of a similar project on the Golden Gate Bridge in California. Officials there said last week that workers recently finished installing suicide prevention netting on that bridge — a project that took more than five years to complete.
Cossette said the Golden Gate Bridge is much longer than the Penobscot Narrows Bridge — stretching nearly 9,000 feet compared to the local one’s 2,100 feet — so naturally projects on that bridge typically take longer. She said she has no particular reason to worry there will be delays for the Maine project, though it did take years of effort to convince the state to support it.
Legislators were first asked in 2014 to approve and provide funding for suicide prevention fencing on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, but did not approve the proposal until last summer.
In 2015, the state installed suicide hotline phones at either ends of the bridge, in the towns of Verona Island and Prospect, but since then, the phones were found to be not working on more than one occasion.
Cossette thinks the fencing will be far more effective than the phones at preventing suicides. She said her son Brandon Cossette, who was 25 when he died, was “very impulsive” and might still be alive if there had been a physical barrier to deter him. In bill testimony last year, suicide prevention advocates told legislators that research shows impulsivity can be a factor in suicide attempts.
Roughly a dozen people are believed to have died of suicide by jumping from the Penobscot Narrows Bridge since it was completed in 2006, and others died before then by jumping from the bridge that preceded it, the Waldo-Hancock Bridge. Conversely, there have been no suicides at the Memorial Bridge over the Kennebec River in Augusta since fencing was installed there in 1983, Cossette said.
“This has been going on for 10 years now,” she said of efforts by her, and relatives of others who have died at the Penobscot River bridge, to have fencing installed.
“If this barrier had been installed [before 2013], I believe it would have stopped my son, thus giving us enough time to get him help,” Cossette said.
