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

Close Up: The UBC students scouted the bridge, machined their own parts, and rehearsed the plan obsessively.

As the group pulled on its coats to go catch a little sleep before the stunt, Johnson rose for a final pep talk. Earlier, he’d confided to me that his stomach had been seizing for weeks. Now, as his right hand twirled a pencil, he began by citing the quality of the equipment. “We have 2,400-pound cables,” he said. “Our carabiners are off-the-shelf parts with published tolerances. Our main job will be to get it over the edge and under the bridge in a safe manner.” On the eve of a massive practical joke, Johnson’s tone was that of a professional engineer. His team nodded in unison.

MISSION IMPROBABLE

A tourist has no business on the Lions Gate Bridge at 4 a.m. in winter. On the center span, I shivered as a barge slid past, 200 feet below. The muffled yap of guard dogs came from a railway yard on the north shore. And at the north end of the bridge, four police cruisers conducted a DUI checkpoint. A shiny new SUV flew by at high speed and braked suddenly when it saw the spinning lights.

I wondered if the police presence might cause the students to call it off. But at the stroke of 4:00, the cops departed, and soon a pickup truck and trailer materialized over the curve of the span. The truck stopped smoothly next to me, and students in dark clothing hustled out. One yanked the blue tarp off the trailer to reveal the Volkswagen. Four guys grabbed the body of the Beetle from the trailer bed and struggled to lower it to street level. The car shell buckled, trickling rust. A thin guy with a shaved head hopped off the bed and onto the street to receive the vehicle and unwisely took the bulk of its 390 pounds for a few seconds. “Coming my way?” he blurted as his knees started to buckle. The foursome found leverage and lifted together, passing the car between the bridge cables and onto the pedestrian walkway.

Everything happened simultaneously. While the foursome positioned the Beetle, Johnson and another crew member prepared the ropes. Success depended on securing two sets of rigging. One team would run the steel cable through a carabiner on a harness atop the car body. At the other end, the cable looped through the bottom of the custom steel hook. A second group would place a nylon rope through another carabiner on the car’s harness and use it to gently but quickly lower the car off the side of the bridge, like a dinghy off a cruise ship. When the car was at the correct position and the steel cable fully stretched, the plan was to remove the nylon rope entirely, to make it look like the car had been placed at the end of the cable by some giant hand.

At first, the group’s adrenaline got in the way. Teammates bumped into one another. Someone kept saying “good, good” too loudly. But then things began to click. Ropes spooled out hand over hand. A student backed toward the railing and, accessing his internal map of the space, reached behind and steadied himself without looking.

As students were busy rigging, Johnson’s father stood next to the truck. They caught his gaze as he looked uneasily at the south end of the bridge, and then a white car appeared. It pulled up quickly, stopping right behind the trailer. The anxiety of the group rose. Unmarked police vehicle? Johnson Sr., unfazed, waved the car around, and it drove off.

“Y’all set here?” he shouted.

“Yes, Mr. Johnson. Thanks a lot.”

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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!!