Free Republic

Long-delayed plans to fix maintenance platforms and put up stainless steel mesh nets on both sides of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge are still far from completion, at a skyrocketing cost of nearly $400 million, according to recent court filings. In 2018, contractors Shimmick Construction Company and Danny’s Construction Company, referred to as SDJV in court filings, were supposed to begin work updating decades-old maintenance and inspection platforms, replacing handrails and adding wind fairing as well as suicide deterrence nets to the bridge. But they say the project as it was originally drawn up by the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway...

Kat Nazar has been leading whale-watching tours in the San Francisco Bay for nearly two decades but it never gets old when she sees a spout briefly skim the surface of the water, followed by a tiny puff of steam. And on Sunday afternoon, she may have had one of her closest encounters yet. Nazar was steering the San Francisco Whale Tours’ 65-foot catamaran — aptly named the Kitty Kat — near the Golden Gate Bridge and Crissy Field when she approached several windsurfers and had to slow down. As they came to a stop and her passengers scanned the...

Protesters stopped traffic on the San Francisco bridge for about 45 minutes Immigration protesters stopped traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge for more than 30 minutes Thursday morning, urging Congress to pass a citizenship bill through the budget reconciliation process.... ...About 25 cars stopped traffic at around 7 a.m. on the bridge, and protesters delivered speeches from a bed of a truck and held banners reading, "Pass the $3.5 trillion spending bill," "Override the Parliamentarian," "Kamala: Override the Parliamentarian," and "Citizenship for All."... ...At least five people were arrested, according to the California Highway Patrol, and four vehicles were...

In the latest step toward the rebirth of San Francisco’s Presidio from an aging former Army base to a bright light of America’s national park system, crews are set to break ground Thursday on a project to build a new 14-acre public park on top of two freeway tunnels near the Golden Gate Bridge. When finished in 2021, the unusual project, called Tunnel Tops, will link Crissy Field, on San Francisco’s waterfront, to the Presidio’s Main Post, parade grounds and visitor’s center. That connection was severed more than 80 years ago when the road to and from the Golden Gate...

The 1970s were a great time for disaster movies. There was Earthquake with Charlton Heston, Towering Inferno with Steve McQueen, the Poseidon Adventure, and many more. By the 1990s, disaster movies had taken on a distinctly sci-fi element, such as the movie Armageddon, which highlighted the twin disasters of an asteroid striking the Earth and a plan to send Ben Affleck into space. That's where we are today, except our science fiction is being portrayed as science fact by liberals who want to scare us with the global warming bogeyman. In their latest attempt, they have produced a map showing...

A record 245 people tried to jump off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 2017, but fewer succeeded, thanks to the city’s men and women in blue. The number of successful police interventions with potential bridge-jumpers jumped from 184 in 2016 to 245 in 2017, while the number of confirmed suicides fell from 39 to 33 over the same period, according to a bridge authority report cited by The Marin Independent Journal. Five new police officers were added to the bridge’s security detail in 2017, bringing the number of officers available to thwart suicide attempts to 36. In May of...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The Golden Gate Bridge is in need of some love and its corrosion in causing concerns. While the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge regularly gets a paint job to prevent rust, the Golden Gate Bridge doesn’t receive the same attention. The Caltrans bridge painters hunkered down on a wooden platform, suspended mid-air are painting and re-painting the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The USS Conestoga left the Navy yard at Mare Island, Calif., on Good Friday, 1921, bound for Pearl Harbor, with a complement of 56 sailors. It cleared the Golden Gate at 3:25 p.m. and steamed into the Gulf of the Farallones in heavy seas. Conestoga was a rugged oceangoing tug that had once hauled coal barges for a Pennsylvania railroad. But 17 years after its launch in Baltimore, it had undergone hard use and had a reputation as a “wet boat,” one that shipped water easily. At 4 p.m. that day, as the San Francisco light ship recorded big waves...

Explanation: The setting is San Francisco Bay, the time is sunset, and the bridge is the Golden Gate. What you are about to see is an unexpected double sunset ending with a rare green flash. Watch closely -- in the recorded time-lapse sequence, unusually warm air created by bridge traffic refracts sunlight toward the Earth, causing a superior image of the top of the Sun to form. This image will disappear -- marking the first "sunset" -- only after the main image has dipped below the deck. All the while, boats pass in the foreground, cars pass over the bridge,...

Explanation: Shadows play on the water and in the sky in this panoramic view of the April 4 total lunar eclipse over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Just within planet Earth's shadow the Full Moon's disk is still easy to spot at its brief total phase. The urban night skyscape was composed to cover the wide range of brightness visible to the eye. The shortest total lunar eclipse of the century, this eclipse was also the third in a string of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, a series known as a tetrad. Coming in nearly six month intervals, the previous...

One of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angel pilots recently flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour, and the moment was perfectly caught on camera by a fan. Tiburon, California, resident Rich Shelton captured Lt. Cmdr. David Tickle fly his F/A-18 right above San Francisco traffic Oct. 9 during Fleet Week. “They don’t always make many passes between the towers, so I was very lucky to catch this shot with my relatively slow camera!” Mr. Shelton told Navy Times. Navy Times reached out to Blue Angels for comment and was assured that all necessary safety precautions were taken...

Rich Shelton loves airplanes and San Francisco, which shows in all his beautiful photos. He was able to take this incredible image of a Blue Angels' F/A-18 zooming through the Golden Gate bridge at Fleet Week in San Francisco.

According to The Independent (Golden Gate suicides: Deaths from San Francisco’s famous bridge ‘reached all-time high’ in 2013): The number of people jumping to their deaths from San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge reached an all-time high in 2013, according to a safety watchdog group. Public suicide rates at the California landmark are among the highest in the world, and campaigners have demanded that something be done after 46 people killed themselves there last year alone. As well as those deaths, police officers and members of the public intervened to save would-be jumpers on 118 other occasions. So why the record? ...

Something doesn't look quite right A Redditor with a good eye caught this still from NBC's Sunday night pregame show Football Night in America, where if you look closely, the Golden Gate Bridge has an extra tower. Also in this redesign of the bridge, the suspension cables just drift into space from the three towers (No need for those! They're just decoration!). We're not sure who is photo shopping like mad over at NBC, but one would hope that the person in charge would know the Golden Gate only has two towers. And if they didn't know, maybe they could...

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just...

The criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service is looking into the finances of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate... ... Agents for the criminal division of the I.R.S. interviewed a former employee of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate on Tuesday at the Oakland field office, in response to a complaint he had lodged. That informant, who declined to be named for fear of how it might affect his future job prospects, said he raised concerns about the financial relationship between the organization and its political arm, as well as about accounting practices. ... [Author's email} kmieszkowski@baycitizen.org

Tuesday August 31, 2010 Not Talking: Planned Parenthood Tightlipped after Revoking PP Name from Affiliate By Peter J. SmithSAN FRANCISCO, California, Aug. 31, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Planned Parenthood (PP) Federation of America is not divulging the details behind its decision to revoke its trademark from a San Francisco area affiliate. The decision to distance itself from one of its own affiliates is a step that is rarely taken by PP: even those clinics caught violating the law by pro-life undercover reporter Lila Rose in recent years have retained full enjoyment of the PP name. Planned Parenthood of the Golden...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Directors of the agency that oversees the Golden Gate Bridge have moved a step closer to approving a suicide barrier along the historic span. The board voted 16-0 to approve an environmental impact report that examines the consequences of hanging steel nets 20 feet below the bridge deck on each side. About 25 people per year die in jumps from the bridge.....

Golden Gate Bridge officials vote for suicide net SAN FRANCISCO — Golden Gate Bridge officials have voted to hang a stainless steel net below the iconic span to stop suicides. The Golden Gate Transportation District's board of directors voted 14-1...

San Francisco (AP) -- Three protesters are climbing up the suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge as part of a protest to the coming Olympic torch relay.