by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Along with its yeoman work of transporting almost a million cars a week over the raging St. Lawrence, the Jacques Cartier Bridge has a lesser-known, more macabre vocation. The 73-year-old cantilever bridge at the gateway to the city's east side is also a preferred spot for those attempting leaping suicides - on average claiming 10 sad souls a year.

The enduring problem led Quebec coroner Paul G. Dionne to assemble a panel of experts to come up with a solution in January 2002, and after much brainstorming they slapped a report on the table last October. The Federal Bridge Corporation, an arm of the federal government, has implemented some of its suggestions, such as installing video surveillance cameras and police bike patrols to dissuade depressed people from flinging themselves off of the span. But the corporation has so far rebuffed its chief suggestion, which is to build an obstacle to physically prevent the man-overboard scenario.

At least one expert is miffed. "The main way to prevent suicides on the bridge appears to be to construct a barrier so that people cannot fall or jump off. That's been successful elsewhere in stopping suicides and that was one of the main recommendations which the bridge has not implemented," says Brian Mishara, co-founder of the Quebec Association of Suicidology.

"The bike patrol and the cameras are wonderful things, but the Bridge Corporation has consistently refused to move on to the area of suicide prevention," he continues. "I would suspect that there's a lot of financial concerns involved. If that's the case then this is tragic."

Mishara stresses that stymieing individual attempts is important because suicide is often a transitory, passing impulse. He notes, for example, that half of all suicide attempts are committed by people on drugs or alcohol.

When a camera spots a would-be jumper, word goes to firefighters at Station 13 on Ste-Catherine E. near Dézéry, part of a team of 100 specially trained "Spidermen," firefighters equipped with ropes and boats and training to talk jumpers down.

Fire squad division chief Michel Champagne says he didn't know how many lives the team has saved, but provincial police stats from a decade ago indicate that between 16 and 34 would-be jumpers are talked down each year from the bridge, although the ratio of saved to not remains constant at about 2:1. The Sûreté du Québec were unable to provide more recent statistics.

The report by the Health Board of Montreal that studied suicides from the Jacques Cartier Bridge between 1995 and 1999 concluded that three-quarters of them occur between noon and midnight. Three-quarters leapt onto the ground near the end of the bridge rather than into the water, and 40 of the 53 who jumped over the five years were men.

Various public health officials have been agitating for at least seven years to have suicide barriers erected on the bridge. Bridge authorities are still studying the issue, according to an official. Vice-president of communications André Girard says that along with the cameras and police patrols, officials have also put up pictograms that instruct pedestrians "to not jump over the fence."