Pat Oden emailed a friend: “We have more National Guard that arrived Thursday, too. They are very young, and when you meet them in town, at the grocery store, etc., they come up to you and thank you for taking such good care of them. They are being housed mainly at the school gym, and have been taken more blankets, pillows, etc. We are now washing the searchers’ clothes, as the going has been tough—wet and cold … All, to a man, thank us profusely for our help and concern for their well being during this emotional task. And it is very emotional … my neighbors have been searching also, and two of them and their team found human remains day before yesterday. The man staying with me found remains yesterday. Most of the remains are being found in and near Hemphill, most in our dense national forests, briar patches up to six feet tall and they must go through these, not around them. Very hard on these men, but they are very dedicated and rising to the occasion.”32
The tight bond of the small town to the recovery of Columbia and her crew led to a saying that quickly spread throughout the community: “Their mission became our mission.”33
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The following day, Sunday, February 9, 1,350 searchers walked in the areas of Sabine County between US 96 and Toledo Bend Reservoir, trying to complete the coverage of a mile-wide path along the new search centerline. The deployment went quicker than the previous day, but there were still problems coordinating so many people. Searchers worried that the cold rain would cause them to be pulled from the field again.
Overnight, the Lufkin command staff decided to pull one of the National Guard teams from Hemphill to search in an area of interest in San Augustine. However, they forgot to inform the Hemphill command post that the unit was being redeployed, which created accountability concerns.
Greg Cohrs felt obligated to accept all the volunteer help being offered, but the huge influx of searchers was overwhelming the leadership span of control and the incident support system. As he feared, the inefficiency of working with so many untrained people in large groups meant that not much debris was located over the weekend. More troublesome, the two remaining crew members were still missing.
After a period of high winds damaged branches throughout the forest, helicopter searches for broken branches in the treetops were no longer producing results. Instead, Don Eddings, flying in a US Forest Service–contracted helicopter, was now on the lookout for buzzards. Every mid-morning, the birds would leave their rooftop perches and begin circling. The search team’s helicopter would fly in to scatter the buzzards and then notice where they started circling again. Eddings would call in the location so ground teams could search the area.
Airborne assets from NASA and the Department of Defense also aided in the search. Although specific details on the technologies involved were not divulged, the incident command team could get detailed information on the location, movement, and number of coyotes and buzzards in the forest.
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After so many days of frustrating searches without results, Greg Cohrs and Terry Lane each prayed on the morning of February 10 that the search for the crew would be fruitful that day.34 During Monday’s morning briefing at the VFW hall, Brother Fred Raney led a prayer for good weather. He closed with, “Lord, let us find the remaining astronauts.”
Help from the Department of Interior arrived. Cohrs was transitioned to another incident command team, led by Mark Ruggiero of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Relieved from having to attend so many meetings, Cohrs could now better focus on planning and directing the search operations.
About 850 searchers were in Sabine County that day, down from the weekend’s mob. To everyone’s surprise and frustration, the contingent from the Department of Public Safety—about three hundred officers—had been rotated out and replaced by an entirely new group, who had to be brought up to speed. School was back in session, which complicated getting the searchers to and from the field, since they had been using school buses over the weekend.
Feedback from the search team leaders led Cohrs to believe that the area between Highway 87 and the Yellowpine Lookout tower had not been covered effectively. He sent some of the searchers back to cover the area again. He had a strong hunch that they might find at least one crew member there. They found nothing of significance.
One of the National Guard units, however, located one of the missing astronauts in mid-morning near Toledo Bend Reservoir and Farm Road 2928. Everyone was elated that another crew member had been found after nine days of such intense effort. However, since this sighting was so close to the reservoir, Cohrs was worried that the last crew member might be in the lake.
Cohrs directed Don Eddings to search the Six Mile and Big Sandy Coves areas of Toledo Bend. Eddings saw nothing from his helicopter.
Rumors spread among the search teams that the last of the crew members had finally been recovered. There was an understandable and unfortunate letdown when information came that evening that the seventh crew member had yet to be located.35
During his search team’s lunch break, local resident Mike Alexander struck up a conversation with Dan Sauerwein, a volunteer searcher who was new to the team that day. Sauerwein told Alexander that he worked in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab—the enormous pool used for space walk training in Houston. Sauerwein took a week’s leave from his job and drove to Hemphill to help search for the astronauts. He brought sturdy clothing but had neglected to make arrangements for lodging, so he had slept the previous night in his car. Alexander immediately offered him a room at his house, joining two other searchers that Alexander was already hosting. Sauerwein later said that he had never been treated so well. As happened countless other times throughout the recovery period, this act of kindness between unlikely strangers cemented a long-lasting friendship.
Greg Cohrs’s day did not end on a happy note, despite the recovery of the sixth member of Columbia’s crew. The command trailer in which he was working was beset by an infestation of wasps.36
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On Tuesday, February 11, Mike Alexander and Dan Sauerwein’s search team emerged from the woods of the Sabine National Forest in sight of the Toledo Bend Reservoir. Someone looked behind them and called for the line to stop. Turning around, Sauerwein was amazed to see shredded canvas high in the treetops—material from one of Columbia’s experiment packages. He thought that if so much of that material was in the treetops near the reservoir, there must be even more in the lake.
In the mid-morning, one of the Forest Service teams called to report they had located the last crew member, near Housen Bayou between Route 87 and the Yellowpine Lookout. This was in the vicinity of where the FBI and Greg Cohrs had suspected something significant would be found.
Cohrs’s feelings of joy and relief overwhelmed him. Successfully recovering the crew had seemed so improbable ten days ago, considering that Columbia had disintegrated two hundred thousand feet high and traveling in excess of 12,000 miles per hour. His careful planning, his insistence on maintaining a disciplined and methodical search, his determination, and his faith had all paid off. All of the crew members’ remains were recovered along a fourteen-mile-long path within the one-mile-wide search area.
The crew members would all be going home.
Word about the final recovery came by radio to the other search teams in the field. When he heard the announcement, Mike Alexander broke into tears. “I just started crying out there in the woods. I couldn’t help it. I thought, We got closure now.”
Don Eddings returned to the command post from his air search that day to find people shaking hands and congratulating one another. He asked the ranger what was going on. “Didn’t they tell you? We found the last one today. It was one of the locations you called in.”
In the afternoon, Cohrs suggested to Brent Jett that Hemphill hold a memorial service for the crew. All of the Sabine County search teams had been in the field when the televised memorial services were held at other locations. The community wanted to pay its respects to Columbia’s crew after working so hard to bring them hom
e.
That evening, Jett asked Cohrs to walk with him to his car. The streets were already empty, the media having moved on several days ago to cover other stories. Jett told Cohrs how deeply he and NASA appreciated the work of Brother Fred Raney, Terry Lane, and Cohrs in helping to search for and recover his friends and members of the NASA family.
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NASA’s Dave King knew his leadership team needed a break after twelve consecutive twenty-hour workdays, so on Wednesday he took them to dinner at an Italian restaurant near the Lufkin command center.
As they ate, King noticed a young girl looking at them from an adjacent table. She came over a few minutes later and asked, “Are you NASA people, and are you trying to recover the space shuttle? I just want to tell you how much I appreciate what you people have done for the space program and our country.”
He found it particularly poignant that this young girl had come over to them and said the words they most needed to hear at precisely the right moment. “That’s exactly what encourages you—the human piece of this thing,” he later said. “To have this little girl, who you look to as the future of this country, to come up and say that … it was unbelievably meaningful to us in that moment. We had all worked very hard and were all very tired, but something like that gives you a new shot of energy to go do what you need to do.”
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Thursday, February 13, was the final day of the Sabine County incident management team’s formal leadership of the search efforts in the county. Responsibility would transition to a new leadership structure on Sunday, February 16.
In the meantime, the Hemphill camp worked a short day on Thursday, then took a well-deserved break to reflect on the events of the past two weeks. Search operations paused on Friday to memorialize the Columbia crew.
Mary Beth Gray of Hemphill’s flower shop prepared red, white, and blue wreaths for Columbia’s crew members. Friday morning’s memorial service began at eight o’clock in the VFW hall, with a procession of people carrying the seven wreaths to the front of the room. Members of the incident command center spoke briefly. Brent Jett delivered the eulogy for his colleagues. He thanked the community for their efforts in bringing Columbia’s crew out of the woods and back to their loved ones.
Minimal response to calls resumed on Saturday. The teams had not yet completed searching every square foot of the twenty-five-square-mile target area. Partial remains, somehow missed in one of the earlier searches, turned up over the weekend. But except for one small find on March 7—outside of the search area—those were the last remains of Columbia’s crew to be located.
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Sabine County’s citizens paused to reflect on the profound emotional and logistical challenges of the past two weeks.
It was impossible to determine precisely how much food had been donated or how many meals had been served at Hemphill’s VFW hall. Best estimates were that this relatively small community and a handful of volunteers had prepared and served thirty thousand to fifty thousand meals in two weeks. The community had donated more than $620,000 in services to the recovery—at no cost to the federal or state government.
No doubt Sabine County’s sense of personal ownership and connection to the search was in large part due to the crew’s coming to rest in the county. Had this been simply a hardware salvage operation, the local citizens might have been interested—but perhaps not so compelled to go to the lengths they did to help. But the presence of the crew and their worried and grieving friends made this a tragedy that touched every compassionate fiber of their being.
Many people in this deeply religious area saw it as divine providence that Columbia’s crew came to Earth in their community. Had the accident occurred anywhere else, the outcome might have been very different. Here, the people kept what they saw and experienced out of the press. They enfolded the NASA family in a respectful, loving, and healing embrace, and they rose to address a national tragedy in a manner that is difficult for outsiders to fully comprehend.
“Texans are really just good people and will give you the shirt off their back,” said Jan Amen. “We might get a bad rap with this redneck thing, but we’re just down home good people.”
Every NASA employee and every person who participated in the recovery spoke of the miraculous, loving deeds performed by Sabine County’s citizens. Even the neighboring communities were astounded by the way the town rose to the challenge. Perhaps it was just the nature of small-town existence. Many residents played multiple roles as part of their everyday life, such as Brother Fred Raney being both the Baptist minister and captain of the volunteer fire department. In larger towns like Nacogdoches, the culture was such that it seemed more appropriate to have the formal organizations and their professional resources deal with the incident.
“It’s just people helping people—that’s what this small town is about,” said Roger Gay. “Everybody likes to help everybody else, and they don’t expect anything from it. It was an occurrence that happened, and we dealt with it the best way we knew how.”
NASA’s Dave King summed up, “The people of East Texas make you proud to be an American, because they sacrificed and gave everything they had to try to help us. It was unbelievable what they did for us.”
PART III
PICKING UP THE PIECES
These really rough, hard-core, no-nonsense, work-hard people on the Native American fire crews would treat every piece they found with such reverence. It wasn’t an inanimate object; it was a very animate, very personal thing. They understand that everything around us is a living, breathing being that we cooperate with. It made me appreciate my heritage, what these people sacrifice, and how special this experience was to them.
—John Herrington, the first Native American astronaut
Chapter 8
COLUMBIA IS GOING HOME IN A COFFIN
By the third day into the search period, while the crew recovery teams were desperately looking for Columbia’s astronauts, we on the Mishap Investigation Team in Barksdale and Lufkin were still trying to get a handle on the size of the debris situation. I was acting as Dave Whittle’s right-hand man at this point, doing whatever I could to support him and manage the interfaces within NASA and with the other agencies. An incredible amount of activity was underway.
At the nine o’clock morning meeting on Monday, February 3, at Barksdale, Paul Monafo from Marshall Space Flight Center reported he was developing a fault tree, which was an analysis of how different basic events or failures might have combined to cause the destruction of Columbia. The NTSB urged people to keep an open mind and not discount any possibilities, no matter how improbable. Monafo, like many NASA managers, nonetheless believed the accident could not have been caused just by the foam impact during ascent. Many NASA managers held onto this opinion for days—even weeks—after the accident. It seemed impossible that a piece of lightweight foam by itself could have damaged the shuttle. There must have been something else involved.
We also began discussing how we might reconstruct Columbia’s debris to determine the cause of the accident. Representatives of both Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center made the case for why their center should be the location for this important investigation. Ron Dittemore and representatives from Johnson Space Center lobbied to bring the debris to Houston for analysis. Johnson had the advantage of being close to the debris field and was home to the engineers with design knowledge of Columbia. On the other hand, Kennedy had an available hangar at the Shuttle Landing Facility that would be ideal for laying out Columbia’s wreckage in a reconstruction process similar to that used by the NTSB for investigating aircraft accidents. More important, we said, our technicians were more intimately familiar with the flight hardware than were JSC’s engineers.
Fred Gregory, NASA deputy administrator and former shuttle commander, was in Barksdale for several days. I discussed with him the pros and cons of the two options. Not knowing at the time that I would later lead the reconstruction effort, I told Fred that I firmly b
elieved that KSC was the better choice for the effort and asked him to support my suggestion.
I asked KSC’s safety manager Gerry Schumann to go to Lufkin to support Dave King. King wanted him to coordinate safety briefings for the press and also to ensure that people working in the field understood risks and how to avoid exposure to hazards. Everyone participating in the searches had to be briefed on the hazardous materials on the shuttle, as well as the other risks they might encounter in the field. The news would get out through the joint information center established at Lufkin—a clearinghouse for all the federal agencies on site to disseminate information related to the disaster.1
We had quickly determined it was better to have Jerry Ross and Ed Mango run the debris collection process locally in Lufkin—close to the debris field—rather than remotely from Barksdale. Ross and Mango continued to set up our debris collection protocol. They ensured the local collection centers were on the lookout for items of particular importance. We hoped that at least one of Columbia’s five onboard flight computers might have made it to the ground. The computers had limited battery power to retain data in memory, and we wanted to recover any data that might still be in the computers before the battery backup power failed. Hazardous items also needed to be removed from the field immediately.
Limited resources in the first several days of the operation meant that most debris items could only be marked, their GPS coordinates recorded, and then left in the field for collection later. If an EPA representative was on a search team, that person could examine an item in the field for hazardous substances and approve it to be picked up if it was not contaminated. We planned to deploy twenty-four NASA teams to the field to assist with debris collection.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 14
