Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  —

  Ed Mango, Dom Gorie, Jerry Ross, and several specialists from the Rapid Response Team left Barksdale Air Force Base for Lufkin at noon in their rental cars. Upon arriving in the Civic Center a few hours later, they were struck by the chaotic activity. Ross’s and Gorie’s blue astronaut flight suits immediately drew attention and inquiries from people who sought direction in how to handle the debris reports. Someone said the governor’s office was insisting that NASA remove debris from all the school and hospital grounds as quickly as possible. Ross gave his car keys to one of the three men who came with him from Barksdale and asked them to help with the school cleanup.

  Ross staked a claim to a work area in the midst of the chaos. He began to formulate a plan and establish the working relationships that would help the debris team accomplish its task. Then he started brainstorming the critical questions he would need to answer: How do you conduct a methodical search? How do you photograph, document, and mark the location of each item consistently? How do you ensure that it’s not contaminated before it’s collected? What are the logistics for getting each item from the field to some holding area and then to wherever it is eventually going to end up?

  Ed Mango asked one of the Texas Forest Service workers if he could see a printout of some of the debris sightings. He noted an entry regarding a tire found at a farm near Chireno, Texas. He wondered how a rubber tire could possibly survive the heat of reentry.

  Then they heard about an unusual sighting near Fort Polk, Louisiana. US Forest Service personnel, looking for debris after hearing loud sonic booms the previous day, had driven past several water-filled mudholes in the remote forest. At first glance, the holes were not particularly noteworthy. But then the searchers saw that mud was splattered forty-five feet high on the trunks of trees surrounding several of the holes.

  The holes were impact craters.

  The team agreed that they needed to investigate these unusual sightings. Dom Gorie had secured for the team’s use several Army Reserve helicopters, which were now stationed at the Lufkin airport. Mango would take a helicopter eastward along the debris track from Lufkin, and Gorie would go west from Nacogdoches. Ross would investigate the craters in Louisiana.

  —

  At the two o’clock status update meeting, Bob Hesselmeyer from Johnson Space Center was announced as the leader for a Data/Records Working Group, tasked with analyzing telemetry and other data from Columbia to try to understand what caused the accident. There were already indications that thirty-two seconds of additional information from Columbia might be stored in Mission Control’s computers.

  Meanwhile, NASA had asked the public for help with the Columbia investigation. They requested that people contact NASA if they discovered debris or had film or video evidence of the accident.10

  The EPA deployed hazmat teams to the field to help decontaminate and collect hazardous debris. EPA was also flying an aircraft with infrared sensors to detect the presence of hazardous chemicals.11

  Six EPA-led search teams began searching for debris in schoolyards along the debris path, assisted by NASA engineers, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and local volunteer fire departments. Fifteen teams would be available the next morning to concentrate on clearing school grounds. In Nacogdoches County, volunteer firefighter Jan Amen told a friend, “Never in my wildest dreams did I picture myself scouring the school yard for pieces of a spacecraft.”12

  —

  Ed Mango was on his way to investigate the mysterious sighting of a tire in a field near Chireno, Texas. As he prepared to board his helicopter at the Lufkin airport, he saw another military helicopter land about a hundred yards away, met by a color guard and an astronaut. All activity ceased as the remains of a Columbia crew member were solemnly carried from the helicopter to a waiting ambulance.

  Mango’s Blackhawk helicopter crew included the two Army Reserve pilots, a technician from United Space Alliance, a Texas state trooper, and a forestry worker. Mango gave the pilot the tire’s GPS coordinates and suggested they get to the site as quickly as possible. It was already late in the winter afternoon.

  They flew low over the national forest on the way to the farm where the tire had been reported. They could see dozens of pieces of debris littering the ground along their route—so much that it was obviously not just trash strewn by careless people. At first, the team recorded the GPS coordinates of each sighting. After logging ten items, they realized there was no way they could keep records of every sighting and still make it to the tire before sunset, so they pressed onward.

  They finally saw the tire in a clearing, and from the air it appeared to be relatively intact. The residents of the farm—a woman who appeared to be in her forties, two kids under ten years old, and an older man who appeared to be their grandfather—had come outside after hearing the helicopter circling overhead. The chopper landed, and the pilot walked toward the family to ask their permission to land on their property. His bubble helmet and green flight suit must have appeared frightening, because the children cowered and clung to their mother as he approached. Mango, dressed in less threatening civilian clothes, ran over and explained that they were federal representatives and would like her permission to investigate the debris on the property. She said, “Of course you have my permission!”

  Mango explained that he would not be able to remove the tire from the property, and that the family should stay away from it in case it was contaminated by fuels. The mother asked, “Are you part of the army?” Mango said that he worked for NASA.

  The grandfather appeared stunned. “You mean there’s a NASA guy in our backyard?”

  The mother then said something that stuck with Mango for the rest of his NASA career. It was a statement, not a question: “We are going to fly again, right?”

  She also told him about some wreckage in the neighboring, unoccupied property. Mango’s crew went to the spot and found a locker from Columbia’s crew module. Some of its contents were intact.

  After taking photos, the team got back in the helicopter and returned to Lufkin, arriving just after sunset. Mango was sobered by the quantity and extent of debris he saw from the air during his brief helicopter trip. Only about a dozen NASA engineers and technicians were in Lufkin at the time to help with debris recovery. Mango called Barksdale that evening and asked our team to send as many people as possible to Lufkin the next day to help with the debris search.

  While Mango was investigating the sightings in Texas, Jerry Ross flew from Lufkin to Fort Polk, Louisiana, aboard another Blackhawk helicopter. US Forest Service representatives met him and drove him by Humvee deep into the forest. When he arrived, he instantly recognized parts of the powerheads of Columbia’s main engines, still visible above the water filling in the craters. As the densest and heaviest components on the shuttle, the turbopumps had followed a ballistic trajectory at supersonic speeds from the time they broke away from the shuttle until they slammed into the muddy ground in the Louisiana forest. These components would later turn out to be the easternmost debris found from Columbia.

  Ross and his guides examined two impact craters—one of which was located on the fourteenth fairway of the Fort Polk golf course—but were unable to visit a third site before darkness and rain set in. Ross flew back to Barksdale that night.

  —

  Jim Wetherbee knew that trying to find the remains of seven people in a ten thousand square mile accident zone was an intractable problem. The area was simply too big. Senior officials from Washington questioned why he had not immediately requested ten thousand National Guard troops to search for the crew. Wetherbee pushed back. It was impossible to bring in that many people immediately to search such a large area. There was no way to support them in the field even if they could deploy there. And ten thousand troops could not efficiently search that much land for crew remains and small pieces of equipment.

  Wetherbee asked headquarters to be patient. If his team could find a way to narrow the search area, then he wo
uld request additional people as needed.

  In the first day and a half, search teams spotted several hundred possible remains in the field. The vast majority later turned out to be from animals, but it would take several days for DNA analyses to confirm identification. Many of the suspected remains, though, were very likely from the crew. Wetherbee and Grunsfeld plotted their locations on a map. They decided to narrow the search efforts to an area sixty miles long and five miles wide, centered on the best-fit line of the suspected crew remains recovered on the first day. This would help them better target the search efforts of the National Guard units who were going to be deployed to the area starting the next day.

  To help coordinate NASA’s participation in the intensive search activities in the areas where crew remains were turning up in the searches already being conducted by the local incident command teams, Wetherbee established forward execution posts in San Augustine and Hemphill. He assigned astronaut Brent Jett as his forward coordinator in the field to brief the local team leaders each day.13 The working relationship with the local search teams assured that NASA could request resources or assistance in searching an area, but direction of the ground searches resided with the local incident commanders.14

  —

  That evening, at the six o’clock status update to Dave Whittle and our team at Barksdale, Jerry Ross reported on his findings near Fort Polk. Bob Benzon of the NTSB agreed to conduct the follow-up investigation. We noted that the potential scope of the debris recovery operation was still growing. Possible debris sightings were being called in from British Columbia to central Florida.

  The teleconference revealed the huge extent of the resources moving into position to assist with the search-and-recovery operations. Four helicopters would be available for searches the next day. Fifteen search teams would be deployed on Monday and thirty by Tuesday. Three hundred Texas Army National Guard troops were being deployed to the area for security and recovery of crew remains. The US Coast Guard deployed members of its Alabama Gulf Strike Team to Lufkin to assist with collection of potentially hazardous debris. Thirty-four additional personnel would be arriving at Barksdale from Kennedy Space Center late that night. Carswell Naval Air Station would be the temporary storage location for debris recovered between Corsicana and the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Other Texas temporary collection sites were in operation at Hemphill, Jasper, Nacogdoches, and Palestine.

  The number one priority item for the debris search was the shuttle’s Orbiter Experiment system (OEX) recorder. The OEX system monitored and recorded hundreds of channels of data during the shuttle’s ascent and reentry. It was installed on Columbia to help characterize various physical loads on the ship, ranging from stresses and strains to temperatures and acoustics. It was the closest thing on the shuttle to the flight-data recorder found on all commercial airliners—and Columbia was the only orbiter instrumented that way. If it was intact, the OEX recorder might contain a data tape of Columbia’s status during its reentry and up to the time that it broke up. This would be crucial to help us determine the cause of the accident.

  The meeting closed with somber news. Two ambulances were en route to Barksdale carrying remains from at least two crew members. They were expected to arrive at eight o’clock.

  The Lufkin leadership team’s teleconference with Texas Governor Rick Perry began at seven o’clock. Perry was upset that the state’s school grounds had not been cleared of hazardous materials, since schools were scheduled to open the next morning. He demanded all school grounds be cleared by midnight.

  The NASA and FEMA representatives briefly muted the line in order to talk among themselves. There was no way they could reliably clear all the schools in the debris corridor—the full extent of which was still not known—by midnight. The FEMA representative came back on the line and told Perry, “We need to put together a plan. We’ll call you back in one hour.”

  The leaders quickly decided to assemble teams of three or four people to visit the schools in Lufkin, Nacogdoches, and Hemphill to determine what material had fallen there and how long it would take to clean it up.

  The crews fanned out and reported back as best they could—cell phone coverage being spotty or nonexistent in wide areas of rural Texas in 2003. Five schools in Nacogdoches were reported cleared of debris.

  There was no definitive news to give to the governor at the nine o’clock update call. By ten o’clock, there was enough data to inform Perry that it was impossible to open all the schools in the area the next day. The team suggested that the most prudent approach was to keep the schools closed, at least on Monday. Perry agreed. The next day, the team would make a concentrated effort to collect all the debris from the schools in the recovery zone.

  —

  As midnight approached on Sunday, the first full day after the Columbia accident, Marsha Cooper and her fellow Sabine County searchers were exhausted. They had endured a physically demanding and emotionally draining day unlike any in their experience. But they knew that the remains of most of Columbia’s crew members had yet to be located.

  Cooper’s team received instructions to investigate a call from a distraught woman who had found something on her property. She drove her US Forest Service colleagues Don Eddings and Felix Holmes to the woman’s farmhouse, followed by several other cars of searchers. The woman told them she had stuck a tree limb in the ground to mark what she found. Cooper and her team walked far out into the pasture by flashlight until they saw the tree limb.

  It was planted in the ground next to a pile of cow manure.

  Cooper and her team burst out laughing. Their nerves were so raw from the long, horrible day that this situation seemed hilarious. “At that moment, we needed that pile of crap,” Cooper recounted.

  The searchers called it a day. Cooper went home. She had one thing left to do before she collapsed into bed.

  Remembering her dreadful encounter with the crew remains at the start of her first search of the day, she took off her expensive new boots. She walked outside, placed them in the burn barrel, and set them on fire.

  Chapter 7

  SEARCHING FOR THE CREW

  By the end of the day after the accident, operations had evolved into two parallel efforts, one for recovering the crew and the other for protecting the public from hazards and collecting the wreckage from the ship. Each task had its own distinct objectives and was led by different NASA personnel.

  On the morning of Monday, February 3, the teams searching for the remains of Columbia’s crew gathered for breakfast and the safety and operational briefing at Hemphill’s VFW hall, reviewing subjects including weather forecasts, search areas, and team assignments. Astronaut Brent Jett conveyed the plan from search headquarters in Lufkin that the search teams in San Augustine and Sabine should concentrate their efforts on the areas where it was most likely that crew remains could be found quickly.1 He also highlighted the special shuttle components that NASA wanted the teams to look for. These included items such as the Orbiter Experiment system recorder, cameras, computers, and communications equipment.

  Greg Cohrs now fielded six groups led by US Forest Service personnel, totaling about 175 searchers. The Texas National Guard deployed about 150 searchers divided into three search parties. Cohrs sent the Forest Service groups on either side of the area that was searched the previous day, between State Highway 83 and Bronson. The new Forest Service groups searched either side of the area covered the previous day near Beckcom Road. Cohrs deployed the National Guard teams in the Bronson area, headed northwest toward US 96.

  Cohrs also had twenty-eight people, divided into fourteen teams, to respond to calls about debris sightings. Six FBI Evidence Recovery Teams of two people each responded to calls from the public or from the search teams regarding possible crew remains.

  Military spotters would be aloft looking for broken branches in the forest treetops—evidence of things falling from the sky at a high speed.2 Some of the Blackhawk helicopters carried canine search units to assist in
locating crew remains.

  Cold, light rain showers made footing treacherous in the field. Some searchers slipped and injured themselves. One woman fell and broke a hip; she had to be carefully extracted from the deep woods.

  The ground searches located two more of Columbia’s crew that day. Both were found in the Housen Hollow area between Farm to Market Road (FM) 2024 and FM 184.3 The first call came in about three-thirty in the afternoon. The remains of the second astronaut were found nearby, while the recovery team was still in the area.4

  As the recovery team went into the woods from the road to find the astronaut’s remains, a white dog followed them, staying thirty or forty feet away. Sheriff Maddox assumed the dog belonged to the owner of the property. He worried about keeping the dog away from the crew members’ remains, but this turned out not to be an issue. The dog stopped and lay down near Maddox while Brother Fred Raney read his words beside the fallen astronaut. To Maddox’s surprise, the dog covered its head with its paws while Brother Fred led the prayer service. At the end of the service, the dog led the team out to the road. Then the dog went back into the woods and was not seen again. It did not belong to the property owner. No one knew whose it was or where it came from.5

  Five of Columbia’s crew had now been located and recovered. Hopes ran high that the other two would soon be found.

  Incident commanders in Hemphill experienced challenges in communicating with their people in the field. Cell phone coverage was spotty or nonexistent in much of the area. Billy Ted Smith asked his logistics chief, Mark Allen, to contact the wireless phone companies about installing temporary cellular service towers in Sabine County. Verizon agreed to provide the recovery effort with trucks carrying portable emergency cell phone towers, as well as a box of cell phones. These would be provided at no cost to the operation, with one request—that when Smith next briefed CNN, he would publicly thank Verizon for the donation.6 Smith’s public acknowledgment encouraged other wireless phone services to donate additional portable towers and cell phones.7