CHAPEL HILL -- High above the madness, UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore Meleah Faucette looked down at all the sweaty students slowly untangling themselves from each other at Davis Library early Tuesday morning and shook her head.
"It was fun," she said of watching, from one floor up, the crazed, 10-minute dance party. "But I would not want to be down there."
Down there was the middle of the UNC Flash Rave, techno-music-fueled frenzy aimed at breaking the stress of final exams. This week's rave was the third in the last three semesters, and it was the largest by far. Police estimate about 3,000 students attended.
Now, some campus officials are getting queasy about a once-underground event that has morphed into massive, public mosh pit.
"We are concerned about it," said Judy Panitch, a spokeswoman for the university's libraries. "We know the students are doing it in a sense of fun, and we know they stayed to try to clean it up. But we also know it's a very large crowd and can be unpredictable."
At midnight, student organizers turned the lights down as music blasted through speakers set up around a second-floor railing where hundreds of students perched to watch.
Students jumped, gyrated, screamed, danced and slammed into each other. Some surfed the crowd, passed hand-to-outstretched-hand across the room.
There's some trust involved in crowd surfing, and in at least one instance, a student slipped through the hands and slammed to the floor. Others had close calls.
"I got nearly dropped twice," sophomore Elena Fenu said. "But it was worth it."
Minor damage done
Campus police were present and reported no injuries. An 18-year-old student was charged with assault after getting in a fight after the rave, police said. A glass panel on the library's front doors was shattered and a table was broken, Panitch said.
When the music stopped, most students left the library, while others helped clean up.
The rave was somewhat clandestine when it started a year ago. This year organizers created a public page for it on Facebook, the popular social networking site, and 5,600 students had pledged their participation. The student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, wrote about it a few days ago.
Still, UNC-CH's student affairs office didn't send a representative, though staff there did watch the many YouTube videos available soon after the event, said Winston Crisp, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs.
Should it be stopped?
Like the library staff, Crisp's office worries about safety if the rave gets any bigger and said campus officials plan to talk about the issue soon. But he and others say it may be difficult to intervene.
"You don't know how many people are coming," Crisp said. "If they are going to gather like that, how do you stop it?"
Randy Young, a spokesman for the campus police department, said crowd control might be a problem.
"We try to weigh whether it's prudent to stop it or whether it's better to just let it run its course," he said.
Billy Mitchell, the campus fire marshal, said he did not attend, had not received any complaints and was unconcerned.
In an interview before this week's rave, junior Bobby Nieland, one of the organizers, said he hopes the rave becomes a regular campus event.
But some students wonder whether it has become too big.
"We went to the first one, and it was much tamer," said Arielle Wright, a sophomore. This week's rave "wasn't fun. It was dangerous."
