IRVINE : Egg Drop Results a Bit Scrambled

“Incoming!” a spectator shouted as a box labeled “Vengeance of Piston-Cylinder Project” hurtled nine stories toward the ground to dump its payload of baked beans and raw eggs onto cheering students.

The more cautious audience members in the Engineering Plaza at UC Irvine had donned rain slickers, remembering last year when pork and beans covered the plaza during the annual egg-drop contest that is part of the university’s Engineering Week.

“We’re very pleased with the amount of splatter,” said one of the designers, Brad Williams, a 1989 electrical engineering graduate who has participated in the contest for four years--without winning.

But if a prize were given for amount of mess or audience response, Williams and his partner Greg Hanssen, a 1990 graduate, would have won.

Although the ostensible purpose of the annual egg-drop contest is to achieve the highest ratio of unbroken to broken eggs, the real point is “to get everybody dirty,” Lance Rushing, a senior from Anaheim. Rushing is the president of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, the student club that sponsors the contest as part of Engineering Week.

Before the contest started, Rushing worried because there were only 18 entries, compared to 50 or more most years. Students attributed the low turnout to the postponement of the contest from last Friday due to rain.

But afterward, as he happily surveyed his food-encrusted slicker and boots and began cleaning up the plastic tarp that had been laid down in the plaza, Rushing said: “This is a good mess. Not too many entries, but an exceptional mess.”

The mood was somewhat muted because of the death yesterday of Greg Bogaczyk, a senior studying mechanical engineering and political science who was a peer adviser in the engineering department and a friend of many of those present.

Participants paused before the contest for a moment of silence and a prayer by Sarah Koelling, the campus Episcopal chaplain. “Greg would want the contest to go on,” she said. Several students, hearing about Bogaczyk’s death for the first time, left the plaza in tears.

But tears turned to smiles as the first contraption was dropped off the top of the 100-foot Engineering Building. Most of the eggs were enclosed in cardboard boxes with a variety of packaging materials, including Jell-O, rice, cereal, popcorn, shaving cream, marshmallows and bread.

When the results were in, Roger Yang was in first place, winning with a perfect score of five out of five unbroken eggs. Michele Nitz placed second and Lai Leung came in third.

Yang, a senior in electrical engineering from Jacksonville, Fla., said he couldn’t reveal the secret of his successful design. But he did disclose that it consisted mainly of a box of cereal--”toasted oats, because they’re cheapest.”