On Nov. 18, 1999, at about 2:42 a.m., the annual Aggie Bonfire at Texas A&M, built entirely by students, collapsed without warning, killing 12 people and injuring another 27.
A week later, when the bonfire was set to be lit, a vigil was held instead at the site of the collapse. 40,000 people in attendance would light candles. At Kyle Field, the Aggie cannon was fired 12 times, once for each person who perished in the collapse.
Kevin Robbins, a professor of practice and associate director at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism, profiled one of the survivors in 2016 for an Austin American-Statesman story titled “The Thirteenth Man.”
He joined Texas Standard to discuss his experience chronicling the tragedy and the impact it has had on A&M. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What were the events that led up to the collapse of the stack? This is something they’d done many times before without such an issue, and here it was, a truly deadly disaster.
Kevin Robbins: They’d been doing it for more than 100 years in preparation for the annual football game with the University of Texas. The stack had reached heights of nearly 100 feet in those 100 years.
In 1999, it was about 55 feet tall. It collapsed without warning. This stack of timber, which is shaped like a wedding cake and had layers, weighed the equivalent of two 747 airplanes. It was massive.
And then it began to lean. The center pole in the middle, around which every log was tethered, broke. The wire banding around the wedding cake structure snapped, and then nothing could be done. The sheer weight of this massive pile of timber just leaned and fell.
You really became a part of this story yourself in a way when you spent about four months interviewing one of the survivors who was injured. Can you tell me about him?
His name is John Comstock. We were interested in observing the anniversary of the collapse in an unexpected, interesting way. And so I found John.
John was from Bridgeland, TX, up near Dallas. He was one of those students who came to Texas A&M to be a part of this community of people who cared so much about these rituals and traditions.
He was on the stack that night as they were preparing to really put the finishing touches on it before they burned it to the ground, and recalls really what we might consider primal fears.
It’s dark. It’s 2:00 in the morning and he’s falling through space. And then he was trapped. He was on the ground pinned by these timbers – his legs, his arm. He couldn’t move at all and was there for many hours. He was the last living person to be pulled from that rubble the next day.
People familiar with Texas A&M football know that the stadium, the crowd, is known as the “12th man.” John got the nickname of the 13th man, is that right?
He gave it to himself. When I met John for the first time in person at his house in College Station in the summer of 2009, I had a look around. There were relics of this event throughout his house. He still had his “pot”, the helmet that he wore on the stack that morning.
He had a death certificate that had been typed by Texas A&M University. It was never issued.
His own death certificate?
His own.
Wow.
It was framed on his wall, and so he really assumed the identity of the 13th man.
It meant a lot to him. It meant a lot to him that he was a part of it. It meant a lot to him that he survived it. And so he even had the moniker tattooed to his back.
