Jumpers leave workers sleepless in Seattle

, Washington (AP) -- A bridge over Seattle is becoming hazardous to the mental health of the dot-com employees and other office workers below, who keep seeing people jump to their deaths from the span.

Thirty-nine people over the past decade have committed suicide off the 155-foot-high Aurora Bridge -- eight in 2006 alone -- and counselors are regularly brought in to help office workers deal with the shock of seeing the leap or the bloody aftermath.

At least one woman, Sarah Edwards, drives on the left side of the street near her office ever since a body landed on the hood of a co-worker's car.

City and state officials, meanwhile, are adding suicide-prevention signs and telephones in hopes of reducing the death toll.

The "suicide bridge," as the half-mile span has been occasionally called since it was built in 1931, carries as many as 45,000 vehicles a day on one of the main north-south highways through Seattle, passing over a narrow channel connecting Lake Washington and Lake Union.

Some jumpers hit the water; others land on the pavement or other solid ground. Either way, they almost always die.

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