19 construction workers fell off the Golden Gate Bridge. All survived.
They called themselves the Half Way to Hell Club. Read the extraordinary true story of the men who fell from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived to tell the tale.
Image: stock.adobe.com
Imagine going to work 220 ft above open water, with no safety equipment, in fog so thick you can't see your own hands, on steel that's turned to ice overnight. For the men who built the Golden Gate Bridge, that wasn't imagination. That was Tuesday.
So, when 19 men fell off the Golden Gate Bridge, it wasn’t a surprise. What was, however, was that every single one of them lived.
This is the story of how the men fell, the club its survivors formed and the tragic morning when luck eventually ran out.
One life = $1,000,000
The construction industry rule of thumb at the time was grim: one life lost for every million dollars spent. The Golden Gate Bridge had a budget of over $35 million. Men willingly signed up for a job knowing it could cost them their lives.
They weren't being paranoid. Across the water, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was going up at the same time, a project of a similar size, and it would open just a few months before Golden Gate. 24 men died during the construction.
For nearly four years, Golden Gate itself had somehow avoided that fate. Then, on 21st October 1936, a beam fell on ironworker Kermit Moore and killed him. It was the project's first death. Nobody climbing the towers the next morning believed it would be the last.
Something no one had tried before
Chief engineer Joseph Strauss wanted to change the awful odds. With construction of the roadway now underway, he spent over $130,000 (a huge sum in Depression-era money) on something no bridge had used before: a vast net, similar to a circus safety net, slung beneath the entire deck.
It worked. At least to begin with.
Not only did it catch people, workers moved faster across the slippery, half-finished steel in the knowledge the net was there. Some got a little too confident. Men had to be threatened with the sack to stop them diving in for fun.
When iron worker Al Zampa fell into it in October 1936, he wouldn’t be the only one. Within a few weeks, ten men had fallen and lived to tell the tale. They became members of an extraordinary club – the ‘Halfway To Hell Club’.
The name was simple. Before, when a man had fallen to his death, workers claimed they’d gone to hell. But the lucky ones who had been caught in the net had only gone halfway.
Little is known today about the fate of the men after they cheated death. Along with Zampa, the net saved the lives of Miles Green, Paul Terry, James Roberts, Jack Miller, Jack Dayle, Edward Stanley, Ward Chamberlain, George Murray and John Perry.
By the time the bridge was finished in 1937, a total of 19 men had fallen into the net and lived to tell the tale.
But just as the workers began to think they were safe, disaster struck with tragic consequences.
The day luck ran out
The net was working perfectly, right up till the morning it wasn’t.
On 16th February 1937, a crew was working on a stripping platform near the north tower. Without warning, one side of the five-tonne structure tore loose from its rail. 12 men went down with it, plunging 220 feet, the height of a 22-storey building, into the net below.
This time it wasn't enough. Witnesses said the sound of the net tearing was like gunfire. 10 men died. Only two survived the fall, including foreman Slim Lambert, who was struck by falling lumber on the way down and had to fight his way out of the wreckage underwater with a broken shoulder and several broken ribs.
In a single morning, the bridge's near-perfect safety record was gone. A plaque on the bridge today still commemorates the men who died building it.
What's under the bridge now
The original net came down once the bridge was completed. It would be decades before anything like it returned.
In 2024, the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District completed a new permanent net, this one built to prevent suicides rather than construction accidents.
A different purpose, with the same basic idea: a net beneath the deck, there to save a life on the day it matters most. Just as had been the case almost 90 years earlier.
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