The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco has been “singing” the song of bad engineering for over a year — This song, which consists of a loud, humming sound reminiscent of whale calls, has been annoying nearby San Franciscans and those attempting to cross the bridge without having their eardrums blown out.

Now, engineers are back to work on the bridge to fix the ghostly sounding noise that happens during high winds, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

What went wrong?

The problem arose as a result of a retrofit of the sidewalk safety railing on the bridge’s western side, which was done to trim down the bridge’s profile and make it safer during high winds. The previous, wider slats were replaced with a total of 12,000 narrower slats. However, with the added safety came the tune, with the winds in San Francisco now producing a harmonica-like sound from the landmark. The sound is audible for miles in all directions.

“The new musical tones coming from the bridge are a known and inevitable phenomenon that stem from our wind retrofit during very high winds,” had explained Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway & Transportation District, in a written statement back in 2020. “As part of the design process, the district did extensive studies on the impacts of the project, including wind-tunnel testing of a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge under high winds.”

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