Eleven workers died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge between 1933 and 1937. That number, while tragic, was remarkably low for the era. The bridge cost $35 million to build, and the standard expectation at the time was one death for every million dollars spent on major bridge projects. By that grim math, dozens of fatalities would have been considered normal.
A Single Death, Then Disaster
For most of the four-year construction period, the project had an extraordinary safety record. Only one worker died before February 17, 1937, when the bridge was nearing completion. Then, in a single catastrophic event, ten more men were killed.
A heavy section of scaffold broke free and tore through the safety net strung beneath the bridge. Twelve workers fell with it. Two survived. The ten who didn’t accounted for nearly all the project’s fatalities in one afternoon. The scaffold was so massive that the net, which had reliably caught falling workers for years, simply couldn’t hold it.
The Safety Net That Saved 19 Lives
The net’s failure on that February day overshadows what was otherwise a lifesaving innovation. Chief Engineer Joseph Strauss spent $130,000 (roughly $2.8 million today) to install a massive safety net beneath the work surface, a decision that was unusual and expensive for the time. Before the scaffold collapse, the net had caught 19 men who would have otherwise fallen to their deaths in the waters of the Golden Gate strait.
Those 19 survivors formed an informal group called the Half Way to Hell Club. The name came from bridge worker slang: when someone fell from a bridge and died, he was said to have “gone to hell.” The men caught by the net had only fallen “half way.” Membership in the club was a point of pride, proof that you’d stared down one of the most dangerous jobs in America and walked away.
Why the Death Toll Was So Low
Strauss was determined to break with the reckless culture that had long defined high-steel construction. Workers on major bridges in the early 20th century were expected to take enormous risks, and fatal falls were treated as an inevitable cost of doing business. Strauss rejected that entirely.
He imposed a rigid safety code and required every worker on the project to follow it. The measures went well beyond the safety net:
- Hard hats. Strauss commissioned specially modified mining helmets from Edward Bullard, a San Francisco safety equipment manufacturer. Hard hats were not yet standard on construction sites.
- Glare-free goggles. Sunlight reflecting off the water below caused a kind of temporary blindness that made it easy to lose your footing. The goggles reduced that risk.
- Wind protection. Workers were given special hand and face cream to shield against the brutal winds that rip through the Golden Gate, which could gust hard enough to knock a man off balance.
- Anti-dizziness diets. Strauss had workers follow carefully designed meal plans meant to reduce the vertigo that came with working hundreds of feet above the water.
- Hangover remedies. Men who showed up feeling the effects of the night before were given sauerkraut juice, a folk cure to get them functional and less likely to make a fatal mistake.
“On the Golden Gate Bridge, we had the idea we could cheat death by providing every known safety device for workers,” Strauss wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in 1937. The approach was mocked by some in the industry at the time but proved its value in the numbers. One death per million dollars spent was the norm. The Golden Gate Bridge came in at roughly one death per three million.
How It Compares to Other Major Projects
Eleven deaths is a sobering number, but the Golden Gate Bridge’s construction was far safer than comparable projects of the era. The Hoover Dam, completed just two years earlier, killed 96 workers. The Brooklyn Bridge, built in the 1870s and 1880s, killed at least 27. The Panama Canal claimed over 5,000 lives from disease and accidents during the American construction phase alone.
The Golden Gate Bridge didn’t just beat the industry average. It helped change the expectation of what that average should be. Strauss’s insistence on protective equipment, safety nets, and even dietary guidelines laid groundwork for the occupational safety standards that would eventually become law decades later. The bridge’s safety record was considered one of its genuine engineering achievements, right alongside the art deco towers and the 4,200-foot main span.