COLLEGE STATION, Texas –It's a day many Aggies will remember. The day the bonfire collapsed.
Today marks the eve of the tragic event that happened 15 years ago tomorrow.
"I'm a third generation Aggie, so my parents were both Aggies as well as my grandparents, so A&M is a huge part of my family,” said Hannah Heidtke, a freshman student at Texas A&M University.
While many remember November 18, 1999 as if it were yesterday, Hannah Heidtke was barely old enough to understand what was going on.
"I was only four when this all happened, but I remember my parents just being upset and crying and I just remember being confused,” she said.
Her parents wept after receiving news that 12 Aggies lost their lives and another 27 were injured.
It was the day the 59-foot high wooden stack of logs would collapse and change the Aggie Bonfire tradition as we know it.
"Over the years, I remember just learning about what happened,” Heidtke said. “It was still kind of strange to me because I wondered why my parents were so upset since we didn't really know any of the people."
Although her parents didn't know the victims personally, it was the Aggie bond that shined the brightest.
"It was just like my parents were telling me, we are all Aggies and that's what really matters,” she said. “Over the years, I remember being impacted by that, but I still didn't know what it all meant."
Today, the ring-style memorial and rectangle shaped portals at the site of where the Bonfire collapsed represent the 12 Aggies who lost their lives.
Another 27 stones complete the ring representing the other 27 students injured during the collapse.
"Walking around and looking at their monuments and what it says about them, it's incredible to see those would have been the people you would have seen around campus and that could have been someone like me,” Heidtke added.
After many years, the Aggie Bonfire tradition still has not returned to Texas A&M's campus.
It is now built several miles north of College Station in a non-school funded event.
Still, Hannah says we could all learn something from such a horrific tragedy.
"It just shows you how life is short, but you have to make it count and love those around you and you can see that in all of these people that they lived their life to the fullest,” she said.
