Extreme Engineering

Canadian student pranksters have turned city lights into Morse code, covered the mayor’s house in fake paint, and dangled a car beneath the Golden Gate Bridge—just to show they can. Our writer risked injury and arrest to join the cult

By Bob Parks Posted 08.19.2008 at 3:39 pm 7 Comments

A young woman addressed the group. She was holding a sheaf of maps with escape routes marked in red pencil. She had scouted the bridge for months. She knew that large cruise ships typically move through the harbor on Wednesdays, so the early-morning Monday stunt shouldn’t obstruct their passage. She knew about the security cameras at both ends of the bridge, and about the small lookout house under the span. The local emergency crews, she said, were slow to rouse. “The number of times someone has stopped their car, put the blinkers on, and puked over the side is huge,” she reassured the group. “They’re not going to respond until they see the car over the side.”

Pull it Together : The UBC students lift the car onto the walkway to rig it [above], a process they’ve rehearsed many times. But after lowering it off the edge [below], the rope caught, causing panic.

“How long will we be on the bridge?” someone asked. “Three to five minutes,” she answered.

A tight division of labor would be the best strategy, Johnson explained to me. The woman with the maps was the chief lookout and transit logician. A woman with braided hair was in charge of hiding the car in a garage in North Vancouver. A woman with hipster eyeglasses was the getaway driver.

Last year, as Johnson and crew began formulating their plan, they foresaw a problem. At Golden Gate, authorities snipped the ropes and let the VW sink. Surely Vancouver authorities would use bolt cutters to send the car to the harbor bottom before dawn. The students didn’t know about the law against dropping things into the harbor, and they worried that there would be no worldwide media storm, no glory, no Black E patches.

So last fall, the group worked on a way to safely hang the entire car from a single point while also stalling maintenance crews. Posing as tourists, they went out to the bridge to study structural features and found a thick steel tab where the walkway’s handrail bolts to the deck. They measured it, and determined that its paint protection had saved it from corrosion. Back at school, they studied the tab’s structural allowances in a steel-design handbook and double-checked their findings against a set of current bridge blueprints (probably provided by a sympathetic alumnus, although the team wouldn’t identify their source to me). “We never got close to the weight limits of the steel,” Johnson says. The team designed a simple, reliable hanging device that was difficult to intentionally cut: an elongated steel J-hook with a narrow slot at one end that would fit the bridge tab like a puzzle piece, and a long shank at the other that would be too thick to sever with bolt cutters from above. (Over the winter, a student slipped designs for it in with a laser-cutting project as part of an externship.) Johnson and crew built the hook to hold the equivalent of six stripped Beetles and hoped that the hook’s long shank would stall response teams for a day to improve the chances of major media attention.

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7 Comments

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jacubious

08/19/08 at 6:02 pm

Haha, I think its funny that I had just written a comment about how UBC was left out of the other prank article.....

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Zilchy Zup

08/21/08 at 6:33 pm

Great inspirational article for people like me, who love to play pranks and think outside the box.

I mean, what's life without the thrill of doing adding fun? We, the next generation, must take back our world!!!

Hint: try buying 100 gift cards, and filling each one with 1 cent. Then use couple pounds of plastic that you just got for $1 and make something useful!

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cup c

09/21/08 at 3:42 pm

Come on, this "prank" has been done before, get a life guys...also just in case anyone is curious, there planning the same stunt for same time same place next year.

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seamountie

11/02/08 at 11:48 am

This was an interesting article, but either the editor or the author (or both) need to have their typing fingers rapped. Only in one place in this article did the author get the name of the bridge right. Not every suspention bridge in the world is called Golden Gate. The bridge in the article is the LIONS GATE BRIDGE. To get such a basic fact messed up not only throws the article but the whole site/magazine into disrepute. Not good for an journal that avers the title 'Scientific'.

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bobbyparks

01/26/09 at 11:16 am

We know our bridges.

Seamountie -- thanks for calling my article interesting. But on your criticism, you're way off -- my typing digits are fine. This article describes an incident that occurred in Feb., 2008 on the Lion's Gate Bridge. At one point, the article mentions that the same band of merry pranksters pulled off a high-profile stunt in 2001 at the Golden Gate bridge. Nowhere else do we reference the Golden Gate prank. Perhaps you read the article too fast?

PopSci has over a dozen copyeditors and fact-checkers on staff. The editors comb the story in five different stages over three months. The fact checkers call everyone mentioned in the story and read them back the content. Then they call their own secondary sources to double check that work. They called me at 10 pm one night to challenge something I wrote. It's a huge pain in the rear for the writer. But that's probably why there has never been a glaring error that ended up in a PopSci feature I've written (OK, a few wayward commas.) Despite the hassle, it's a great system.

While interviewing this top-secret British Columbia crew, it was hard not to become inspired by their good spirit. They remind me of a quote in an old Tom Robbins book: "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

Does anyone have any questions about standing around on a cold bridge at 4 a.m. waiting for some rowdy college students to drive up?

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:40 am

Hello....the title of your article says that Canadian students hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge. Ummm... I think you mean the Lion's Gate Bridge!!!!!!! You really should fix this mistake, it really kinda looks bad.

Thanks.

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:46 am

oops, sorry, I too read the article too quickly. it's just that it looks bad to have "Golden Gate Bridge" in the title and then immediately below there is a picture of the Lion's Gate Bridge. But if Canadians indeed hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge, that's good!!