February 8th, 2008

A history of bench-burning regulations

In a comment posted on The Chronicle’s Web site Thursday, an alum mentioned that fire permits were once acquired for both home and away games against the Tar Heels, which lead me to do a little digging in our archives. And here’s what I found:

- March 1994, a student was injured during a bonfire celebration, which sparked conversation about bonfire safety and future regulations
- February 1998, a foam party was apparently organized in place of bonfires. Needless to say, students were not pleased
- September 1998, administrators started talking about bonfire regulations. This is where our current stipulations that bonfires are allowed after certain victories and at certain spots around campus came from

- Later that month, administrators looked to obtain fire permits from the Durham Fire Department, which required them to identify five spots for the bonfire. Permits for specific games cannot be obtained until 24 or 48 hours before the game
- November 3, 1998, the first set of bonfire rules were published in The Chronicle, stipulating that all bonfires will be extinguished by the fire department by 1 a.m., among other things
- January, 1999: we won, and we burned 11 benches
- March 1999, we burned benches following an elite eight victory.
- February 2000, the administration added a couple more rules into bonfire burning: “students cannot use gasoline or fire accelerants, build a structure higher than three benches or stand within 10 feet of the fire,” according to a Chronicle article.
- October 2000, only four bonfire permits were secured – apparently a step back from the usual six. Officials eliminated permits for celebration after ACC championships and regional finals. What stayed are of course, the UNC games (but both home and away and only for the men’s) and the last games for both the men and the women.
- January 2001, we burned more benches without a permit after a win against UNC. The fire department threatened to take away the next fire permit, but decided to reinstate it in the end.
- November 2001, the University got an extra permit for the men’s Maryland game at home
- January 2002, Duke Student Government asked students to stop burning after UNC game victories…. Well, we can all guess how that turned out
- February 2005, the fire department took our permit away after a bonfire that was started on campus that was deemed too dangerous by the fire marshal and extinguished within 45 minutes. All permits for the remaining games of the season were cancelled.
- February 2006, we got our permits back, but with some changes. The current rules regulating how many benches, how often benches can be added and the orientation of stacking were set in place.
- February 6, 2008: we burned more benches without permits.

I’m not too sure what I can conclude from this rough timeline, which is probably missing many key points. But it looks like bonfires are hard to prevent if Duke wins.
-Jiajia Zhang

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Editor's Blog, Sports, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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