A project to build barriers on the French King Bridge — to address suicides and other safety issues — that was at least five years in the making has apparently been deprioritized by the state Department of Transportation, leaving local officials unclear on the present status of the project and its potential future.

The French King Bridge is known locally and more widely for its striking view of the Connecticut River. The bridge, which connects Route 2 across the river from Gill to Erving, is 140 feet above the water’s surface and has railings that are only 3½ feet high.

Erving Police Chief Chris Blair — who spends a lot of time at the bridge, often at night and in bad weather — said he has worried that one of his officers could accidentally fall over the side.

Inarguably, the bridge has developed a reputation as a site for suicides. From 2009 to 2019, data obtained from Erving town officials show there were 313 calls for service related to potential suicides at the bridge, 14 confirmed suicides, 62 people taken into custody and two declared missing.

In 2020 so far, there have been at least 13 calls for service. In one case, the body of Caroline “Morgan” Bren, 34, who went missing in April, was found downstream in the river over a month after her disappearance. This is not considered a confirmed suicide, but Bren’s partner discovered she had researched the French King Bridge online before her disappearance.

“I have six officers in Erving — the same six people taking those calls over and over and over,” Blair said. “It makes you angry, it makes you upset. It’s emotional stuff that we go through all the time. It takes a toll on us.”

Top priority

For years, Erving and Gill officials have advocated for safety improvements to the bridge. Both towns consider it their top priority in transportation infrastructure.

But because the bridge is managed by the state Department of Transportation (MassDOT), the most the towns can do is to stress the project’s importance. MassDOT’s plans and inner workings can be relatively opaque to the public, frustrating town officials.

Even if the towns had direct management of the bridge, town officials noted the renovations they seek would probably be far too expensive.

In late fall of 2016, MassDOT installed cameras on the bridge, which were intended to aid emergency responders in investigating suspected suicides.

Though they definitely help, Blair said, the system is far from perfect. They are not video cameras; they are still cameras programmed to take photos at regularly timed intervals. In many cases the cameras have been used to determine when a vehicle was left at the end of the bridge. But because the cameras don’t capture everything, the absence of photo evidence doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that a person jumped from the bridge.

Proactive suicide prevention

New infrastructure to proactively prevent suicides, rather than retroactively confirm them, has proved harder to get.

The same MassDOT initiative that led to the installation of the cameras was also supposed to eventually lead to the construction of improved safety barriers on the sides of the bridge. In 2018, MassDOT conducted a feasibility study on suicide prevention structures for the bridge. Within the year, MassDOT presented design options for Gill and Erving officials to review, and all agreed on the same one.

Every year, MassDOT publishes an update to its Capital Investment Plan, a document that outlines its capital priorities for the coming four years. In the four-year plans published in 2019 and 2020, as expected, the agreed-upon safety barriers for the French King Bridge were listed.

But it is unclear whether any progress is actually being made. Erving Town Administrator Bryan Smith said, as far as he knows, the project is still at the stage of legal permitting and preliminary structural analysis. Town officials were told that an engineering firm would be assigned to the project, Smith said, but it hasn’t happened yet.

This spring, like every year, MassDOT released the draft of its new Capital Investment Plan for public comment. Likely because of the economic uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s document gives a one-year outlook, rather than the usual four years.

Reviewing the plan, as they do every year, Erving and Gill town officials were surprised to find that the French King Bridge project was not listed at all.

Gill Town Administrator Ray Purington wrote an open letter to MassDOT CEO and Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack, which was also published in the Greenfield Recorder, emphasizing the urgency of the French King Bridge problem. As Purington’s counterpart in Erving, Smith sent a letter to MassDOT, too, including with it a recent report from the town on the numbers of calls that emergency response agencies field regarding the bridge, and estimates on how much money the responses cost.

“I’m sure our project is not the only one that came off,” Smith said. “But if the bridge was able to come off the plan so quickly, how can we ensure that it will be added back on when the department returns to a four-year plan?”

New information on the plans for the bridge was expected to be discussed at a meeting of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments’ Transportation Planning Organization, which had been scheduled for last week. But the meeting was postponed to the fall.

Maureen Mulaney, one of the managers of the Transportation Planning Organization, said she had not been advised of any new information on the status of the French King Bridge project.

MassDOT’s public relations offices did not respond to multiple voicemail messages requesting information on the bridge project’s status.

Costs

The cost of the proposed safety barriers is estimated in Erving’s study to be $3 million. The cost of responding to a call for a potential suicide — tallying the hourly rate of every agency that potentially responds, including emergency services from Gill, Erving, Montague, Northfield, Greenfield, State Police agencies, ambulance companies, MassDOT and others — is estimated at up to $8,625 per suspected incident. The cost to only Erving over the next 20 years (the minimum lifespan of a metal safety barrier) is estimated at $1.76 million.

“What’s a human life worth?” Blair asked. “To me this is an absolute no-brainer. It’s a few million dollars. I understand it’s a lot of money. But that’s a drop in the bucket of all the projects in the state.”

The public comment period on MassDOT’s draft 2021 Capital Investment Plan — the one in which the French King Bridge was conspicuously absent — ended at the beginning of June. The final plan usually comes out in July of each year, although Smith guessed it might be delayed this year as a result of the pandemic.

In the meantime, he said, he has emailed his contacts at MassDOT to ask for some update on the status of the French King Bridge project, even if only in a private email or phone call. He hasn’t heard anything since.

Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.

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