Section A·Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, May 3, 2000
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Cause of bonfire collapse released
Structural problems caused accident at Texas A&M
The Associated Press
COLLEGE STATION, Texas Texas A&M University students cut corners in construction and school officials failed to adequately supervise them before the bonfire collapse last fall that killed 12 students, an investigating panel reported yesterday.
Five people who were asked by the school to determine a cause for the Nov. 18 accident cited organizational failures and structural problems with the 59-foot pile of logs, which weighed more than 2 million pounds.
The panel said safe bonfire construction was beyond the capability of student leaders.
The commission said drinking and horseplay were not a direct cause, but were among the problems that led to an organizational failure.
"The most important point is the fact that a combination of factors and not one factor led to collapse."
Leo Linbeck Jr., the Houston construction executive who headed the panel, said a safe bonfire was possible if school officials had taken precautions.
said panel member Hugh Robinson chairman of a Dallas construction management company.
Linbeck made no recommendation as to whether the 90-year tradition would be continued. But his comment that the bonfire could be built safely brought cheers from the crowd of 1,500 students who filed the Aggies' basketball arena to listen to the panel's findings.
Texas A&M President Ray Bowen praised the commission for what he said was its thoroughness and precision, and said, "There's nothing I've heard that I disagree with."
He said he would take about six weeks to decide whether to continue the bonfire tradition.
"If I allow my heart to make the decision, we would continue bonfire," he said. "My heart will not make the decision. My brain needs to make the decision."
The bonfire event annually draws thousands of Aggies to the College Station campus on the eve of A&M's football game against its archival, the University of Texas.
The structure is built during several weeks with stacks of logs the size of telephone poles put in place by cranes, tractors and student workers. The logs are wired together, and the structure — which resembles a tiered wedding cake — is designed to twist inward and collapse on itself as it burns. The center pole consists of two long telephone poles spliced together end to end and buried 15 feet deep. It is held in place by guy wires.
During the collapse, wires snapped and the entire structure gave way. Twelve people working on the stack were killed; 27 others were injured, some seriously. One student left the hospital last month and is partially paralyzed.
Still, many A&M students and relatives of those who were killed in the collapse have said they want the tradition to remain.
The commission determined the structural failure was caused by excessive stresses on the lowest of the four tiers. Those stresses were heightened by excessive wedging of logs from the second stack into gaps in the lowest stack.
The lowest stack, however, had inadequate wiring to hold it together. Steel cables used in recent years were not used in 1999, the commission found.
The panel also found the logs were standing too vertical, the stack was overbuilt and the ground had a slight slope.
Another member of the panel, El Paso real estate executive Veronica Kastrin Callaghan, cited evidence of drinking, irresponsible behavior and hazing by student leaders of the bonfire project.
Callaghan said students and school officials ignored a sharp increase in injuries in recent years and overlooked previous structural problems with the bonfire.
The university should have ensured "controls were in place so if a failure occurred, results would be inconsequential," she said.
"The central message is clear," she added. "The collapse was about physical failures driven by organizational failures whose origins span decades of administrations, faculty and students."
The panel also included the chairman of alternative energy company and the former chairman of Texas Christian University.
"I think there is a lot of relief that the investigation is closed and we now know the truth behind it," said A&M freshman Doug Keegan. "Now we have an idea of the problems, and whether they can be corrected."
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