In June 2000, TAMU president Ray Bowen declared that Aggie Bonfire would be suspended for two years in order to figure out how to make it safe. While there was some controversy over this (including a group named Keep the Fire Burning who proposed a renegade off-campus Bonfire), most students accepted it.
Then over the next two years, the university's handling of the aftermath of Collapse was a complete cluster**** in which they refused to pay the injured's medical bills until they got sued. And enacted a draconian "risk management" in which a recognized student organization would have to fill out several pages of paperwork just to go out to dinner.
And then, on February 4, 2002, Bowen (who by then had already announced his retirement pending the selection of a successor) held a press conference to male an announcement about the long-awaited Bonfire 2002.
There wouldn't be one. Liability insurance was too expensive. And the project's safety consultant quit and the university couldn't find a qualified replacement.
Well, there were a *lot* of Aggies unhappy with that announcement. And that night, a few got together and decided to take the Bonfire issue into their own hands.
So they started a little organization named Unity Project. Another renegade Bonfire idea. There was a lot going against it. First of all, difficulty getting funding, so its members had to sell plasma and max out their personal credit cards. And *fierce* opposition from the university, to the point where ResLife fired RA's for supporting Unity Project. But despite this, 200 brave Aggies went into the woods somewhere in the Brazos Valley and killed a bunch of trees. No Stack, but logs were pushed into a pile with a bulldozer. And it burned.
The next year, the organization adopted the less-coded name "Student Bonfire", and had an Old Ag professional engineer come up with a vertical stack design. Superficially a "wedding cake" style like pre-1999, but with all logs touching the ground and the Windle Sticks added for extra stability. That was when I joined.
If you can find them, I think TexAgs still has some old threads from 2002 when Unity Project was going on.
