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An estimated 70 students were working on the Aggie Bonfire before dawn on a weeknight in 1999. It was the last week of construction before it would be lit in front of 70,000 people.
Music was blaring. A meteor shower was expected at any time over the 59-foot-tall log tower on the Texas A&M campus.
Then, without warning, the 2-million-pound stack that had grown by the hour crashed to the ground at 2:42 a.m. Nov. 18, killing 10 students and a former student. Some had fallen from the fourth stack to the ground, but most of those who died were trapped inside the twisted wreckage.
Tim Kerlee Jr., who brought the death toll to 12 the following day, had spent several hours pinned under the unimaginable weight of the stack, directing rescue crews to victims who could be removed with ease, but couldn't be seen through the dark and thick dust kicked up by the collapse.
In all, 27 students were injured, several critically. Most who recall the incident remember the stack starting to sway and hearing the loud, sickening crack of the center pole before it fell apart.
Student EMS workers initially cared for the wounded, followed by city firefighters and police. Soon, the state's urban search and rescue team -- which is based in College Station -- aided in the efforts. The sun rose and fell long before those crews left the Polo Fields.
Following are a few of the stories from the injured:
Holding on
That they'd actually allow a college student to chop down a tree with an ax attracted Chad Hutchinson to bonfire, he says.
"The more I found out about it, the more I knew I had to do it," said Hutchinson, now 29, living in Houston and working in sales. "Bonfire is intertwined around all of A&M."
The 2002 industrial distribution graduate was a groundman on the fourth stack that night, when the floor beneath him fell.
"I basically just grabbed the log in front of me ... held on for dear life ... and rode it down," he said.
He ended up with two collapsed lungs, a cracked eye socket and tubes in both sides of his chest to help him breathe.
"There was definitely survivor's guilt," he said. "It makes you think about a lot of stuff. There were some really good and talented people. You could see they were going places. They didn't make it and you did."
He ended up marrying his girlfriend at the time, Rachael, who also was working on bonfire during the collapse but wasn't injured. The couple have two children: Mason, 4, and Scarlett, 14 months.
"There's a special bond, a mutual respect, that me and my wife have on top of our personal relationship," he said.
He would like to see the stack of logs one day return to campus, but only if students could maintain enough control that it's still student-led, rather than having a construction company oversee it.
Regardless, bonfire still occupies his thoughts now and then, 10 years later.
"When the winter's crisp, and it gets cold outside, I think of it," he said.
'This is it'
His buddies on stacks above him had been yanking his swing to playfully mess with him earlier in the night, so Lanny Hayes didn't panic when his swing tensed at 2:42 a.m.
"I looked up," said Hayes, now 28, who was on the bottom stack, "and here comes the thing falling on me, falling on everybody ... In that split second, everything slowed down, and I thought, 'This is it. I'm going to die on bonfire.'"
He had a badly injured right foot and bumps and bruises, and spent an hour in the stack as rescuers delicately extricated him.
The West Texas native now lives in Houston, with his Aggie wife and 4-year-old daughter, Caitlin, who can already sing the Aggie War Hymn. She has an early start on Aggie traditions, Hayes said, but explaining Nov. 18, 1999, will wait.
"It was about people getting together and doing something bigger than themselves, a rite of passage," he said of Aggie Bonfire. "That's the way I saw bonfire, and that's the way I continue to see bonfire."
If the collapse didn't happen, Hayes probably would have been part of the tradition the next year and lived in his same dorm. But instead he moved to another, where he met his closest circle of lifelong friends.
"Would our paths have crossed if that hadn't happened? In that way, it did change my life," he said. "These guys mean the world to me, and I wouldn't have gone down that path."
He continues.
"But I'd give anything to have my friends back that day," he said. "What it boils down to for me, and it's a cliché, it's not what happens to you, it's how you deal with it ... I'd like to think that I did the best I could to make the most out of it."
A last-minute decision
Derek Woodley switched spots with his buddy Tim Kerlee Jr. about 10 minutes before the stack of logs they were working on collapsed in 1999.
Woodley went on to teach intelligence at an Air Force base in San Angelo, marry his high school sweetheart and father five children.
Kerlee became 17 forever, immortalized in bronze in a $5 million on-campus memorial.
"I'm here and he's not -- I don't know why," said Woodley, now 29. "I think there's a reason. I just don't know what it is yet. And I may never know."
Woodley landed on his backside after falling from a swing about 50 feet in the air. He had a fractured back, and the pain was so sharp he blacked out.
"As soon as it started collapsing, I couldn't believe it. I never thought it could have fallen over," said Woodley, who also had a broken left wrist, cracked ribs and a left calf slashed from baling wire.
Woodley poured through the investigation of a committee formed to examine bonfire's collapse, learning everything about the incident that killed his Fish Camp buddy. He wanted to know whether the tradition would continue on campus. He wanted it to.
"When they said it wasn't coming back, I lost interest and focused on other things," he said.
He stayed in touch with Kerlee's parents, who moved to College Station after the collapse, until he graduated with a political science bachelor's in 2003. Today, he has lost touch with all of his fellow survivors.
"It was traumatic at the time, but I don't think it really negatively impacted [my life]," he said. "It made me more appreciative ... You wake up every day thinking you'll be back in your bed at night. You might not."
A blur
Britt Hanley was working about 50 feet off the ground when the logs started moving under him, and then he remembers the feeling of falling.
"It's like trying to remember a dream," the 29-year-old said. "It was all pretty much a blur. I woke up and there's a girl over my head holding my hand, telling me it's going to be OK."
He was one of the lucky ones, especially for how high he was on the fourth stack. He escaped with a bloody chin.
Hanley, who graduated in 2004 with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, now lives in Houston, where he is coordinator for operations on a drilling rig.
During his free time these days, he enjoys simple pleasures such as golf and mountain biking.
He wasn't supposed to be on that stack that night. He had planned to study for a test but headed out to the Polo Fields to work on stack for a while to "blow off steam."
He never considered the possibility that bonfire could collapse.
"They gave me a task, I climbed up there and did it. They put an ax in my hand, they showed us how to swing it, and we did it," he said.
He won't be able to attend the 2:42 event because of work the next day, but he might be at the Reed Arena event.
Hanley attends memorial services occasionally. Nov. 18, 1999, has faded into just another one of many experiences that shaped him.
"The only time I think about it is when it's brought up this time of year," he said.
'A bond that can't be replicated'
Mandy Nakai Lucke chuckles when she thinks about bonfire's still-present physical impact on her life: she has a hard time shaving her left underarm.
She suffered a cervical sprain on her neck. She was supposed to do physical therapy exercises in the shower after the collapse, but blew them off, and now doesn't have a full range of motion in her neck, especially when it comes to looking down and to the left.
"When you're a kid, everything fixes itself and you recover," she said. "When you're older and you get injured, it doesn't work like that."
But the 28-year-old, who was wiring logs on a swing on the first stack, escaped with minor injuries. She fell near the tires of the crane, so the logs fell on it, leaving open space around Lucke that prevented her from being crushed.
"Every time something important happens in your life, every milestone that you hit, you kind of think to yourself, 'Miranda didn't get to do this,'" Lucke said. "You treasure it, and you're more thankful for everything that you have."
Miranda Adams -- one of the 12 who died -- had selected Lucke to take her place the following year on the group that would have looked at building bonfire in 2000.
There would have been three others from Mosher Hall on that committee: Veronica Cepak White, Amy McLeod Hollingsworth and Jacqui Martinez Kellogg.
Bonfire wasn't to be the following year, but the four became best friends, attending each other's weddings, and planning to meet Saturday for a reunion in College Station.
"We have a bond that can't be replicated," said Lucke, now living in Fort Worth with her husband and working as an engineer for American Airlines.
She was a lonely freshman who didn't know a soul at Texas A&M when she arrived. It was the desire to meet people that drew her to bonfire.
"People often ask, if you knew what would have happened, would you have participated?" she said. "And every time, I have to say yes. Bonfire was the best thing I ever did at Texas A&M ... The camaraderie, the fellowship ... just the way it made me feel about myself."
