Bonfire Stack Leaned Before Crash, Pupil Says

A Texas A&M; student says a computer analysis he performed on pictures of the school’s 40-foot bonfire stack suggests it was leaning well before it came crashing down, killing 12 people.

Doug Keegan, a senior applied mathematics major, said Tuesday that there were “minor discrepancies” in photos of the stack taken 36 and 60 hours before the Nov. 18 accident.

“The main thing I noticed was slack in the perimeter lines,” Keegan said, referring to cables connecting the stack’s center pole to perimeter poles. “They are secondary signs that indicate a lean to me. I may or may not be right.”

Keegan found the photos on the university’s local computer network, where another student had posted them. They were shot with a movie camera, perched atop a building near the bonfire site, that provided a live feed to the university Web site. No complete recording of the feed is known to exist.

Using his computer, Keegan superimposed a grid over the photos and discovered what he believes is slack in the support cables on one side of the 7,000-log stack and a slight bow in the center pole.

Poor lighting in the images made it difficult to say conclusively whether the center pole was leaning, he said.

Keegan turned the photos over to the university, which on Monday made them available for public inspection. Thousands of documents relating to the accident have been cataloged at A&M;’s Cushing Library.

Keegan’s work has not yet been examined by the committee looking into the accident, said John Weese, an A&M; professor of mechanical engineering who is serving as liaison between faculty experts and a five-member team of investigators. Weese said the center pole and at least one of the perimeter lines will be investigated.

Benjamin Kelley, dean of Baylor University’s engineering and computer science school, believes uneven distribution of weight might explain the collapse. But he added that the materials and method used in constructing the bonfire stack make it “a very complicated structure.”

“The logs certainly aren’t uniform . . . and it’s tricky any time you deal with something round,” he said. “And the students are binding them together with manual labor. There’s a lot of variations there.”

One student who was working on the pyramid of logs at the time of the collapse said that moments before, the stack seemed to be leaning slightly.

“One side seemed to have more weight on it,” said Paul Alexander Jones, a freshman who suffered minor injuries. “I’m not sure how that happened.”