By Sierra Hartman
For those who live within earshot of the Golden Gate Bridge, that familiar moan of the foghorn is either a nice bit of ambiance or a reason to sleep with earplugs. For those who live further away, you can call (415) 202–3809 on a foggy day and listen to the horn live — no kidding. (The Exploratorium installed a phone next to one of the devices so you can test the speed of sound.) I live two and half miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge, and I enjoy listening to the sound of the foghorn. I’ve grown so accustomed to it, though, that I don’t even hear it unless I’m thinking about it. The one exception came last October, when the south tower horns blew continuously for 30 minutes at 2 a.m. In spite of causing the foghorn to lose a few fans in the Marina, its breakout solo inspired some memorable tweets:
@creativeholly: is there some sort of 2am #foghorn concert in #sf tonight? either that or someone passed out on the horn. 20 minutes without a pause now.
@sallykucha Shout out to the #foghorn for living life on its own terms. NO ONE PUTS FOG HORN IN A CORNER.
The idea that someone may have passed out on “the button” got me thinking: Is there actually a button that turns the foghorn on? Is there some lonesome guy at the top of the tower with one of those long, Ricola-style alpenhorns who just lives for foggy days? I went over to the Golden Gate Bridge to find out more and wound up meeting Jamie Briggs, one of the crew of electricians who keeps the juice flowing all around the Golden Gate.
These guys handle the foghorns under the bridge span (five in all), the beacon lights at the tops of the towers, and every piece of electronic gear in between. Apparently they get called for just about every problem on the bridge, 24/7 — including when a patrol officer was trapped on the wrong side of a broken sidewalk security gate in the middle of the night.
There are three foghorns under the Golden Gate Bridge roadway mid-span and two on the south tower pier so ships can steer between the borders just by sound. Throughout most of the year, San Francisco foghorns average about 2.5 hours of operation per day. During the thickest of summer glooms, though, the horns can be on for days at a time. They ran for almost 30 consecutive days back in 1992.
It turns out that the process for turning the foghorns on and off is as straightforward as buzzing someone into your apartment building. When it starts looking foggy, one of the crew members gets up, walks out to the sidewalk by the tollbooth, and looks under the Golden Gate Bridge. If they can’t see across the channel, they turn the horns on — not using, as you might imagine, a fantastic big red button under a plastic cover, but rather a mundane computer interface, à la Windows 95. The workers still have the old switch box mounted above a tool bench next to the “solvents and lube” box, I suppose out of nostalgia.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering about that October incident, the operators have removed the faulty switch and installed a couple failsafes to prevent any more late night hornathons.
To listen to the fog horns and learn more about their history, visit this link.
