Re: Are there physics lessons to be learned from Texas A&M tragedy.

[Richard Grandy <rgrandy@RUF.RICE.EDU>]

I'm from Rice, not A&M, but I believe the motive was to get as tall a
bonfire as possible with the material available.

The method seems to have been to bury a tall pole partly in the ground and
then to stand the logs on end and wire them to the central pole, then wire
others to those,and so on.

According to reports in the Houston Chronicle members of the engineering
department had warned their chair that this was an unstable configuration
several years ago, but it was never reported further up.  A&M is a former
military school  which is still highly authoritarian and one suspects that
raising mere theoretical engineering questions about a central tradition
would not have been welcomed.

The current story is at:    http://www.chron.com/

Richard Grandy
Rice University
Houston TX



At 3:30 PM -0800 11/20/99, Shapiro, Mark wrote:
>        I was somewhat surprised to see in the video and still pictures from
> the recent Texas A&M bonfire collapse that the logs that were being used to
> construct the bonfire were stacked on their ends.  My first impression was
> that this was an inherently unstable configuration.  Almost all the other
> bonfire configurations I have seen stack the wood in a more stable
> "cross-stack" configuration.
>
>        Does anyone have any information about the construction details,
> particularly why logs were stacked on end for this bonfire?
>
> Mark Shapiro
> http://www.IrascibleProfessor.com