Collapse of Texas A&M; Bonfire Tower Kills 11

With a loud crack like a snapped tree trunk, a 40-foot tower of logs for a history-drenched bonfire collapsed early Thursday, crushing at least 11 Texas A&M; students to death and injuring 28 other, four of them critically.

All the victims had been on the structure, helping to build it. University officials said they didn’t know the cause of the disaster, the first on such a scale in the 90 years since the A&M; bonfire became a tradition. Some witnesses told the student newspaper that a crane had struck the stack while lifting logs into place, cracking the center pole at its base, but others contradicted the account.

Constructed by hundreds of students with the help of professional engineers, the wedding cake-like structure is an elaborate and meticulously organized project. It is built on the same plans year after year out of heavy tree trunks felled, stripped and lashed together by teams of students.

Hours after the collapse, many of the hundreds of “pots”--or volunteers wearing hard hats who had helped to build the bonfire--were grimly struggling to hoist the heavy logs off again. Lashed together and collapsed onto each other, the 10-foot-long logs formed a kind of pick-up sticks puzzle, officials said, with any wrong movement likely to harm victims still trapped underneath “We take it one log at a time,” said Ken Bennett, director of a state rescue unit. “They’re wired three together in stacks, so we have to cut the wire and move them one at a time.”

Rescuers used sensitive sound-detection equipment to try to find students trapped under the logs, but no sounds from victims were detected after about 1:30 p.m. After the recovery of two bodies trapped beneath the pile late Thursday, school authorities said they believed all those at the scene had been accounted for.

Though the bonfire pile collapsed at 2:20 a.m. on a dusty field off the main campus, the area was bustling with volunteer builders, refreshment servers and students just watching for fun, one volunteer said. They were deep into “push” week, the days before this tradition-bound college is to face the University of Texas in their annual football game, which is the day after Thanksgiving in Austin.

Witnesses said the disaster occurred with only the loud snap as warning--a warning that came too late for some.

Sophomore Diana Estrada said she was about 200 yards away from the stack when it fell.

“It just toppled over, and the wires snapped and the lights started sparking and going on and off,” she said. “We ran over there as fast as we could, and we could see legs sticking out and hear people screaming.”

“It fell, it hit the ground, and there was a big cloud of dust. We heard people screaming and yelling,” said Jarrick Crowe, a freshman who was working on the structure shortly before the disaster.

Identifying himself only as Brandon, one sophomore clenched his jaw as he described the accident.

“There was a crack--just a loud crack, like when they call ‘Timber!’ in a forest,” he said. “Then it was twisting on itself.”

A bonfire devotee who’d been working on the structure only hours before, Brandon was visiting friends at the site when he heard the snapping sound. Like many other students at this extraordinarily close-knit college, he began to help as fast as he could and by late Thursday was still on the field, covered in dust.

Like others, Brandon voiced irritation at what he believes were attacks on the bonfire project’s safety. On the other hand, some students expressed the view that the ritual was no longer worth the price.

Sallie Turner, editor of the Battalion, the student newspaper, arrived at the site 15 minutes after the crash to find a haunting scene.

“Students were trying to figure out who had died, what outfits were working on that side of the bonfire,” she said. “People were taking head counts. . . . They stared with a gaze in their eyes that this didn’t really happen.”

Eight of the victims, all men, were from Texas. One, Jeremy Frampton, was from Turlock, Calif. Two were not identified. The victims’ ages were not released.

In the disaster’s aftermath, as silent onlookers watched or prayed and volunteer teams slowly dismantled the bonfire, students on the campus of 43,000 were quick to defend the project to outsiders.

“I’ve done this for years--ever since I was in high school,” when he used to sneak in with friends, Brandon said. Brandon’s father had been an Aggie before him, he added, and had worked on the bonfire without mishap too.

“It’s a freak accident; that’s all it is,” he said. “God wanted it to happen, so it happened.”

A&M; officials said that between 50 and 70 students were on top of the logs when the structure collapsed. That number was consistent with previous years in this highly ritualized project, they said.

Though there are strict rules about who may climb on the structure, about 5,000 students in all take part in the bonfire-making process. The completed project, looking like a six-tiered cake fashioned of poles, was designed to stand 55 feet tall and would have used about 7,000 logs.

Similar stacks collapsed in 1994 and 1957; there were no serious injuries in those mishaps.

University officials also defended the project’s being run by students, noting that in addition to faculty and professional advisors, each committee of builders took special safety courses and assumed leadership only after years of experience.

A&M; President Ray Bowen said this year’s bonfire will be canceled, and he wasn’t sure if the tradition will be revived.

Campaigning in Iowa on Thursday, Texas Gov. George W. Bush called the deaths a tragedy but defended the bonfire tradition. “I spoke to the chairman of the regents today, as well as the president of the university. My heart goes out to the families and students that are hurt and [my] prayers to those who may be alive still underneath the bonfire.”

The disaster came at the end of a heartbreaking autumn for the university. On Sept. 18, five people were killed when an airplane crashed carrying members of an A&M-related; skydiving club. And less than a month later, an A&M; student was one of six young people struck and killed on their way to a fraternity party by a truck driver who fell asleep at the wheel.

But if few communities face such a chain of disasters, few might be as well equipped to cope as the history-conscious Texas A&M.;

Since the university’s founding as a military academy in 1876, its ever-growing roster of traditions and rituals has unified its students. “I think that’s the main reason that a lot of people come to the university,” said senior Amanda Palm, a writer on the college paper.

The traditions range from the absurd to the solemn. They include a collie, currently Reveille VI, who will receive a military funeral when she expires.

The Twelfth Man tradition invokes 1920s student E. King Gill, who left the stands, put on a uniform and offered to spell injured players in a football game if needed. To this day, Aggie students stand up throughout games to show their willingness to pitch in.

But the traditions also reflect a deep seriousness about the Aggie bond, expressed most distinctively in the Silver Taps ceremony. Held the first Tuesday of every month, if the need arises, the ritual calls on all students to dim their lights at nightfall and gather for a prayer service commemorating anyone in the college community who has died since the last ceremony.

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Collapse of a Texas Tradition

Dozens of students were working on the bonfire structure early Thursday when the logs gave way, trapping and killing at least nine.

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BONFIRE TIMELINE

* 1909: First year

* 1936: First bonfire of “non-stolen” material

* 1957: Structure rebuilt in two days because of collapse

* 1969: Bonfire 109 feet, 10 inches tall

* 1970: Size limited by university to 55 feet tall, 45 feet wide

* 1994: Structure rebuilt because of collapse due to wet ground

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Source: Texas A&M; University; news reports; Researched by JULIE SHEER / Los Angeles Times

* PLANS UNCHANGED: California students go ahead with plans for bonfires. A3

* TOWER GRAPHIC: How structure was built. A27