Barry: The tragedy behind Sunday’s M62 traffic chaos

Jun 30 2010 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

LIKE thousands of others, my girlfriend Jenny was stuck in Sunday’s massive tailback on the M62.

Police closed the motorway in both directions after a suicidal man was spotted on Scammonden Bridge. He came down after three hours of negotiations.

For thousands of people, Jenny included, this incident ruined their Sunday afternoon, as they were forced to spend hours on a baking hot motorway, not knowing when they were going to get moving.

But none of this matters when weighed against the fact that a man’s life was saved.

However, reading some of the comments on the Examiner website about this story made me feel uneasy.

For instance, roan242 tells us: “How selfish, if he was going to kill himself he should have got on with it, not disrupt thousands of other people’s days. Surely there are many other high places he could have gone and reckoned to jump off.”

Another poster, pwoodw, agrees: “If you are going to jump you would just jump, you would not create a scene by threatening to do so. Pure attention seeking!”

As I say, reading these kind of comments made me uneasy, not because I disagree with them – in fact, quite the opposite.

Often when I hear that someone has thrown themselves off a motorway bridge or in front of a train, I will say to my colleagues that the dead person was selfish to ruin the days of thousands of others with their final act.

It was only when I saw similar remarks written down in black-and-white that I realised how callous an attitude this is.