- September 27th, 2006, 2:10 am
#32013
Oh those wild & crazy LU students 
LU students document bridge jumpinghttp://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Sate ... ws!archive
By Ron Brown
rbrown@newsadvance.com
September 26, 2006
When roughly 50 Liberty University students and others went bridge jumping last month, Devin Olson decided to ride along and video the activities.
Now his 3-minute, 57-second video clip is available on the Web site YouTube.
The students can be seen jumping off the James River footbridge and a CSX railroad trestle near Snowden into the water.
“I am a freshman this year so that actually was my first time tagging along,” Olson said. “Basically our dorm and our sister dorms went over there one day for this event where they were jumping off the bridge. Apparently, it is something of a tradition. I don’t know how often they’ve done this in the past.”
Olson, of Manassas, said he did not jump off the bridge and the trestle himself.
“I was just there for videotaping purposes,” he said. “It wasn’t just Liberty students, there were other people there probably from other local colleges. There were quite a few peers that we didn’t recognize.”
The jumping went on for at least an hour, Olson said.
“That was just one of several events we did that day,” he said.
Olson, whose major is journalism, said he decided not to jump after receiving advice from home.
“Somebody had told me the bridge was something like 60 feet tall and my mom heard about that and she made me promise the night before that I wouldn’t be jumping off a 60-foot bridge to my certain doom,” he said. “In reality, it turned out to be 20 to 25 feet.”
He said next time he might jump.
“I’m kind of the daredevil type,” he said. “My hobby is traveling the country and riding roller coasters. I don’t do anything that could lead to my untimely demise. They did take precautions in jumping away from supports on the bridge and out into the middle of the river.”
Law enforcement officials said safety precautions don’t overcome the potential risk of jumping into unfamiliar waters.
“Any railroad property that is posted is off-limits to any pedestrian traffic at all times,” Amherst County Sheriff Jimmy Ayers said. “If you’re caught on it by railroad police, you can be charged with trespassing on railroad property.”
The footbridge actually runs across the river from Amherst County to Bedford County.
“The footbridge is in place for people to walk the span of the river,” Ayers said. “It is not to be utilized for any kind of swimming purposes.”
Whether it is legal or not, Ayers said common sense would dictate that the bridge is not to be used for diving.
“The danger involved in the river is that the level of it sometimes up and sometimes down,” Ayers said. “You always have debris floating down. There could be a log or anything floating underneath the water. When the river is up, you have a lot of undertow. The river has a lot of uncertainty to it.”
Major Ricky Gardner of Bedford County Sheriff’s Office offers similar advice.
“Obviously, it is not the safest thing for them to be doing,” he said. “The danger could run rampant. We had a kayaker drown over there two years ago.”
A Liberty University student drowned in the same area earlier this year.
“Over the years, we’ve had several drownings through there,” Gardner said.
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