Midgley Bridge is on the city’s official seal, even though it’s outside city limits. The grand entrance to the city from the north should be a gateway, but as of late, it has become a morbid site from which four people in the last three months have taken their lives.

After the third suicide at Midgley Bridge this year, Assistant Managing Editor Ron Eland began working on a story about the number of deaths at the bridge and local efforts to prevent them. The story was slated to go to press when the fourth suicide happened early last week.

The 77-year-old bridge over Wilson Canyon is no stranger to suicides — many of our longtime staffers can recall people they knew who took their lives there decades ago.

I drive over the bridge twice a week en route to the Flagstaff Poetry Slam held every Wednesday. On my way back down in October 2013, my passengers and I encountered a roadblock as Coconino County Sheriff’s Office Search & Rescue crews finished recovering the body of a man who had jumped a few hours earlier.

The sheriff’s deputy acting as incident commander on the scene gave me the pertinent information regarding the road closure and recovery efforts while we stood near the victim, secured inside the recovery package. The deputy then stepped out of earshot to guide the coroner’s van through the search and rescue vehicles, leaving me alongside the man in the body bag.

In those few moments, my one-sided words were futile and I am left to forever wonder if there could have been anything I could have said hours earlier that would have prevented his death and our encounter on the bridge.

Firefighters, law enforcement officers and search and rescue teams are trained to deal with all sorts of life-or-death emergencies, but the psychological trauma of recovering the bodies of suicide victims from the same site over and over does not get any easier.

Local agencies have discussed ways to reduce or prevent suicides at Midgley Bridge for years, but the high number of deaths in such a short period has increased the need to find a permanent solution.

A sign for the suicide hotline was recently installed at the parking lot, and while there is no way to know if they have prevented any suicides, we can hope.

High fences along the sides or an arched fenced over the bridge are the most obvious solutions, but they require the Arizona Department of Transportation, U.S. Forest Service and Coconino County to agree to physical changes to the bridge that would reduce potential suicides while still allowing the access of tall vehicles into and out of the canyon. All the agencies need to put aside their jurisdictional red tape and bureaucratic nonsense and just agree to weld fencing to the side of the bridge to prevent any further deaths.

There are nearly 40,000 suicides nationwide every year. While fences will not prevent the deaths of those determined to commit suicide, they may stop a few. Preventing even one is worth every effort we can put forth.