Community Environment Government Transportation

City removing ‘love locks’ from bridge over Donkey Creek

If you’ve walked across the unnamed Donkey Creek bridge lately, you may have noticed a sign placed there by the city of Gig Harbor: “Locks Are Prohibited on This Bridge — All Locks Will Be Removed Without Notice.”

For all you lock lovers out there hoping it was a late anti-Valentine’s Day joke, it’s not. The city prohibited placing locks on the bridge, and staff started removing them about three weeks ago.

“The locks on the bridge at Donkey Creek are attached to the wire safety mesh along the pedestrian walkway,” city public works director Jeff Langhelm explained in an email. “These locks add weight and reduce the integrity of this important safety element. This has been documented through the last few bridge inspection reports from Pierce County.”

The city of Gig Harbor began removing so-called “love locks” from the bridge over Donkey Creek about three weeks ago. Photo by Vince Dice

A few years ago, Gig Harbor Now’s Tonya Strickland wrote about how the dangers the locks pose weigh heavily on city officials’ minds. She highlighted the most famous example of a bridge literally breaking under the weight of love locks: The Pont de Arts in Paris, where a railing lost its battle with the gravity of all it held in 2014.

Langhelm pointed out that the top recommendation in the bridge’s inspection report is to simply remove the locks.

When we asked whether locks leech dangerous chemicals into the water, and whether the city plans an art installation to hold locks (as nearby jurisdictions have done), spokesperson Lori Maricle said: “[a]s far as what chemicals and metals leech out of the locks, the city is not the best source for this information. We also cannot speak to programs running in other jurisdictions.”

Donkey Creek bridge inspection report by vince.dice

Environmental hazard

The National Parks Service in a 2023 Facebook post asked visitors to stop leaving locks in parks because of the health risk both the locks and the tossed-away keys pose to wildlife. In the case of the parks, people often left keys where birds could swoop down and eat them.

In Grand Canyon National Park, for instance, people threw keys into the canyon. Condors swallowed them.

“Condors love shiny things. They will spot a coin, a wrapper, or a shiny piece of metal, like a key from a padlock that has been tossed into the canyon and eat it,” the parks service wrote. “Condors are not meant to digest metal and many times cannot pass these objects. The X-ray image on this post is of the crop of a condor. You can see coins lodged in the digestive tract of the bird. This bird had to be operated on to clear the obstructions. If a condor ingests too many objects like this, it could die.”

Like any other piece of plastic or metal litter, fish and other marine life can eat the keys people throw into waterways, which can hurt or kill them, too.

Love lock installations

Love lock sculptures stand at both Chambers Bay Regional Park and the A Street pedestrian underpass in Tacoma. The installation at the park encourages people to place their locks on the art installation, rather than the cables lining the guardrails. It includes a key receptacle, so people don’t just throw them in the water. It’s part of Pierce County’s Swoon Project.

The brightly colored Sound Transit installation at A Street includes pillars with mesh so people can leave locks there. Called “Lock-On Tacoma,” by artist Diane Hansen, the famous Parisian love locks inspired the work.

“Staff did provide a proposed project as part of the 2025-26 budget to place an art piece to hold the ‘love locks’ at Donkey Creek Park,” Langhelm said. “However, this proposed project was deferred either due to cost or staff capacity.”