Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  Ross directed that any of the crew’s personal equipment items located during the searches be sent directly to him for examination. Over the course of the coming weeks, he saw kneeboards, checklists, and pieces of the flight suits from Columbia’s crew.

  At the collection and storage sites, there were not enough NASA resources to perform triage on the material coming in from the field. I called Denny Gagen at KSC and asked that he send more people to Texas as quickly as possible. In the meantime, collection centers had instructions to check each item for hazards, enter its brief description and GPS coordinates in the database, and then ship it on to Lufkin. From there, it would go by truck to Barksdale. Betty Muldowney—a quality control manager from KSC who came out with us on the first flight—was organizing the process for receiving debris at Barksdale, logging it, and transferring it to wherever it would be studied.

  —

  At 12:30, Administrator O’Keefe and Fred Gregory declared that the hangar at the southeast end of Kennedy’s Shuttle Landing Facility would be the location for examining Columbia’s debris. Recovered parts of the shuttle were to be shipped there from Barksdale as soon as the hangar was ready.

  We heard reports from California of three possible pieces of shuttle debris. In addition, someone reported a debris field near Phoenix. If these sightings checked out, we would dispatch recovery teams to both locations.

  Our calls for more resources were yielding results, and the magnitude of the nation’s response to NASA’s need was incredible.2 An additional sixty people would be deployed from Kennedy by Thursday to help with debris recovery and processing. Ralph Roe said that he would be sending people from Houston to Barksdale to help identify “interesting” material. Later in the afternoon, Houston also committed to sending three teams to Lufkin to join the debris collection and identification effort. A twenty-five-member disaster mortuary team was headed to Lufkin to assist in working with remains of Columbia’s crew.3 The FBI was deploying Evidence Recovery Team members to ensure that debris collection practices were consistent across search teams and collection sites. The Texas National Guard announced that they would deploy 477 troops to help with debris collection beginning the next day. The coast guard sent additional personnel from its Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Strike Teams to Lufkin. FEMA was establishing a third disaster field office at the Fort Worth Naval Air Station. And the EPA was analyzing water samples in Louisiana to check for contamination by shuttle debris.

  Astronaut Jim Reilly visited Toledo Bend Reservoir with representatives from EPA, FEMA, and the coast guard. They searched part of the shoreline, near where fishermen had reported seeing objects impact the water, but they found nothing.4 Jasper sheriff Billy Rowles was managing the local water search effort. Boats and dive teams from the local law enforcement and the FBI operated out of the Fin and Feather Resort attempting to locate debris. Reilly reported that the water search effort needed to be expanded.

  Meanwhile, other welcome resources appeared on the scene. The Blue Bell Company provided ice cream coolers at all of the command centers and field offices and kept them stocked, at no cost to the recovery operation. Community Coffee provided coffee machines at every one of the collection centers, also at no cost. The Salvation Army also provided meals for all of the personnel in the Lufkin command center.5

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  Nathan Ener and Tim “Peewee” Mitchell, residents of Bayou Bend Road west of Hemphill, spotted broken treetops in the forest canopy near Ener’s house.6 Mitchell saw what he thought to be a small garbage dump in the forest floor below. They examined the site more closely. Lying in a shallow crater on the forest floor below was Columbia’s nose cap and some of its supporting structure (which some local citizens referred to as the “nose cone”). The dark gray reinforced carbon-carbon dome was cracked from colliding with the trees at high speed. Ener called in his find, but his description was vague, and the people taking the call did not immediately understand its importance.7

  It is understandable why the call might have been overlooked. By the end of the day on Monday—only two and one half days after the accident—there were tens of thousands of reports of debris on the ground in thirty-three counties in Texas. About twelve thousand pieces of debris had already been collected.

  The lack of communications infrastructure was one of the most frustrating bottlenecks early in the accident investigation, especially when trying to talk to people in the field. Cell phone service was practically nonexistent. Calls to Hemphill had to be routed through the fire station’s front desk, which was overwhelmed with the calls coming in from searchers in the field and from local residents who were still finding material on their property. Calling back from the field to Lufkin was also challenging. Gerry Schumann resorted to making his calls on the pay phone at a Hemphill grocery store.

  Although NASA and FEMA had provided satellite phones to some staff, they were difficult to use. Callers needed to be on high, unobstructed ground to get a clear shot at the satellite—impossible in Sabine County’s dense forests. Even in more wide-open places like Nacogdoches or Palestine, a satellite phone user had to stand out in the middle of a field or on top of a hill to make a call. The phones’ batteries ran down quickly.

  Our temporary work-around was a network of runners. Each morning’s status meeting in Lufkin concluded with written instructions for each of the recovery sites. Then runners would drive the written messages to the leaders at each of the debris collection centers. If there was any news to go back to Lufkin, the runners could bring that information back by car.

  Our teams used the runner system for the rest of the first week of the debris recovery operation. The process seems laughably quaint or inefficient now, especially for a high-tech organization such as NASA. However, it was the only solution at the time for exchanging detailed information in remote, rural locations where landlines, cell phones, satellite phones, and high-speed Internet were not widely available.

  Meanwhile, cleanup of debris around schools, hospitals, and other public places continued. FEMA worked with the county judges in each of the affected counties to determine priorities for clearing debris. The county judges and FEMA separately reported back to Governor Perry about the status of the process. Good progress was being made by the end of the day, with about half of the schools reported free from Columbia debris.

  —

  KSC quality control inspector Pat Adkins drove from Shreveport to Lufkin to get his assignment for the debris recovery operations. Because of his familiarity with Columbia’s crew module, he deployed to the San Augustine and Hemphill areas, where items from that section of the shuttle were being found. On the drive through the countryside toward Hemphill, Adkins noticed places where the road and shoulders were dusted with something that looked like fine snow. It turned out to be a powder composed of small chunks of tile and silica from the shuttle’s heatshield.8

  Adkins arrived in the early evening at the San Augustine command center, which was essentially an old house that had been converted to a community meeting hall. He recognized astronaut Chris Ferguson, who was sitting at a table and cataloging some recovered items into a spreadsheet on his laptop. Ferguson pointed to the closet and told Adkins that it contained plastic bags filled with items that had not been examined yet. Adkins looked inside and immediately smelled oxidizer from Columbia’s propulsion system. He propped open the door and a window to let the room air out.

  Adkins donned latex gloves and began going through the material, separating out the items that might have been contaminated with toxic propellants. Everything was wet and muddy. In the bottom of the first bag, he saw a wristwatch with a fogged-over blue face. A few minutes later, he found a music CD with Hebrew writing on it. These startling objects were a grim reminder of what had occurred—a wake-up call for the emotional challenges he would be facing in the coming days and weeks. He took the crew’s personal items out of the closet, washed them off, bagged them, and gave them to Ferguson.9

  —

&n
bsp; Thanks to an all-out effort by the EPA, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, local resources, and NASA, all of the school grounds along the debris path in Texas were reported clear of shuttle debris by late evening on February 3. Schools opened and students returned to their classes Tuesday morning.

  Meanwhile, more resources were showing up to recover and process shuttle debris. By February 4, the EPA had thirty-eight debris recovery teams on the ground in Texas, with an additional eighty teams expected by the end of the week. One hundred members of the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Teams were on the ground.10 The C-141 cargo plane scheduled to bring another wave of our NASA technicians to Barksdale from Kennedy was unable to make the flight Monday night because of mechanical problems, but a replacement aircraft was due Tuesday morning.

  Although we were making some headway, the scope of the debris problem continued to grow. Half of Louisiana’s sites had been cleared of debris,11 but the overall land area that needed to be searched thoroughly continued to expand. Thirty-eight Texas counties were now reporting debris on the ground, with sightings of possible debris in California, Arizona, and Nevada. NASA and the EPA agreed to investigate those sightings.12 FEMA itself had no authority under the disaster declaration to enter those states unless shuttle debris was actually confirmed there.13

  A US Coast Guard strike team went out onto Toledo Bend Reservoir on this cold, rainy morning. The twenty-four-foot boat with side-scan sonar and divers would supplement the dive teams already on-site searching for debris.14

  —

  Nathan Ener15 once again phoned the Hemphill command center to remind them about finding Columbia’s nose cap the previous day. This time, he described the object in enough detail to attract immediate attention from the people taking the call. A NASA team came out to the site and confirmed that this was clearly a significant piece of the shuttle.16

  NASA permitted the media to cover the process of extracting the nose cap from the woods—one of the largest operations related to a single piece of debris in Sabine County. The state police blocked off Bayou Bend Road, requiring the media to park along Route 83. Marsha Cooper from the US Forest Service was assigned to take the media to the site. She deliberately led them on a circuitous route to confuse them and prevent them from easily finding their way back unescorted.

  The original extraction plan called for lifting out the bulky piece by helicopter. Felix Holmes of the US Forest Service cut down some of the large trees surrounding the wreckage to give a helicopter a clear shot at lifting the nose cap and its supporting pallet out through the forest canopy. The weather would not cooperate, though, and a strong cold front and rain blew in shortly before the scheduled operation. The flight was canceled. It was too dangerous to risk the helicopter and the priceless piece of the shuttle by attempting to hoist the heavy object up through the trees in a high wind. Holmes cleared a path so that a four-wheeler towing a trailer could haul the nose cap out to a waiting tractor trailer for transport to Barksdale.

  Meanwhile, Pat Adkins investigated a call reporting a spherical tank resting against a fence line. He realized immediately that it was still “hot”—its lethal contents of nitrogen tetroxide gradually seeping out and fuming upon interaction with the rain. The tank was too hazardous to approach, and the ground around it was contaminated. He placed a “crime scene” tape at a safe distance around the tank. He asked a Texas DPS trooper to keep watch over it—and stay upwind of the tank—until the EPA could decontaminate it and collect it.

  NTSB investigator Clint Crookshanks was with a search team that found about one hundred pages of a manual in what had once been a three-ring binder. The cover of the binder was missing, but the pages appeared almost untouched and unburned.17 Other finds were not so well preserved. Once-pristine metallic components were now heavily oxidized, twisted, and scorched. Some of the debris resembled car parts that had been rusting in a junkyard for fifty years.

  Many of the hundreds of pyrotechnic and pressure devices that had been aboard Columbia turned up along the debris path. Some were large, while others were as small as BBs—like the initiators for the inflation cartridges in the crew’s life vests. Everything had to be treated as hazardous, because they may not have been expended and might be damaged, which could cause them to go off without warning.

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  The various collection sites along the debris corridor checked in at six o’clock that evening. Ed Mango, Dom Gorie, and Jerry Ross reported from Lufkin that “a lot” of material was being collected. Teams had identified helium and gaseous nitrogen tanks in the field but had not picked them up yet. Some 70mm film had also been recovered. As teams filled their vehicles with debris, they drove the material to the nearest collection center for processing. Once a collection center received enough material to fill a semitrailer, the packaged items would be sent to us at Barksdale.

  At the end of February 3, we had asked the debris collection centers to note how many items had been recovered that day, and, if possible, to describe what they might be. The next day, Lufkin requested specific GPS locations for the items collected. Several times each day over the next several days, the debris team in Lufkin relayed the information by phone to us at Barksdale, with verbal descriptions of significant items that had been recovered.

  The problem was that each collection center—and in many cases each agency—was recording debris sightings and recovery in their own way. In the opening days of the recovery operation, information was being handwritten on forms and faxed to Lufkin. Sites with computers logged the debris with software ranging from makeshift Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to more sophisticated databases. The GPS locations of debris sightings—and even of crew remains—were being recorded inconsistently in the field, with some teams recording decimal degrees and others using degrees, minutes, and seconds, resulting in misunderstandings on the ground. To add to the confusion, the same piece of debris sometimes appeared on multiple databases identified with different key numbers.18

  It was impossible for us to get consistent answers to basic questions, such as which items had been recovered and where, where they were being stored, whether the debris had been identified, and when it would be shipped to the processing site at Barksdale. It was particularly important for NASA to get firm answers on where items from the crew module were being recovered, so that teams searching for the crew remains could be more precisely deployed.

  Database management and reconciliation was quickly becoming a nightmare. With tens of thousands of pieces of debris being found, we could soon lose control of the situation.

  In response, FEMA created and fielded a new Shuttle Interagency Debris Database using the Geographical Information System, which could help generate search maps. The collection centers initially emailed back to Lufkin a spreadsheet at the end of each day. Later, a NASA team from Houston created a web-based method to simplify data input and to help document and validate the data. But while this effort was underway, the EPA continued to collect debris in the field and enter the information into its own database.19

  This challenge was resolved by working out how to pass information back and forth between FEMA’s and the EPA’s databases. An interagency team spent weeks working through the tens of thousands of records already entered to identify duplicate records and enter all the information into the new format. This was critical for targeting searches later in the recovery operation.

  One of the most important lessons learned from the debris recovery operation was the need to have an agreed format for databases to use in all-incident emergencies.20

  —

  At our request, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued guidelines on February 5 for how first responders should deal with shuttle debris. Private citizens were told not to pick up any debris, even though much of it was likely not hazardous. First responders needed to be aware of dangers that included: stored energy (high-pressure tanks and cylinders); monomethyl hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide, and ammonia; pyrotechnic devices (anything marked y
ellow/black near window frames, landing gear, crew seats, hatches, and antennae); and biological material.21

  Responders were ordered to stay with anything marked SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL, or SSOR (space-to-space orbiter radio) until someone from NASA arrived on the scene to collect it personally.22

  NASA requested that FEMA alert the residents of seven rural counties in Texas west of Fort Worth to be on the lookout for possible scattered shuttle material. Data analysis suggested that shuttle debris might have fallen farther west than we previously thought.23 We continued to refine the expected debris path using NASA’s ground track for the shuttle above eighty thousand feet and Department of Defense radar data below eighty thousand feet.

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  The FBI said they were investigating approximately twenty reported thefts of shuttle wreckage. They were also looking into seventeen Internet auctions of what people claimed to be pieces of Columbia. Officials suspected that souvenir hunters illegally collected over one hundred pieces of the shuttle.24

  The US Attorneys Office announced a limited prosecution moratorium—until Friday, February 7, at five o’clock—for people who voluntarily turned in shuttle debris. Other callers returned items that they had picked up but did not initially turn over for fear of being accused of tampering with evidence.

  Interestingly, after the moratorium was announced for Columbia debris, NASA received a few calls asking if the moratorium also applied to material from the Challenger accident seventeen years earlier. NASA said yes—and several pieces of Challenger’s wreckage were then turned in.25

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  By February 5, Humanities Undergraduate Environmental Sciences (HUES) and Forest Resources Institute labs at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches were printing more than one thousand search maps every day. The university also fielded nearly seventy search teams, with almost two hundred people working to locate shuttle debris. Their state-of-the-art GPS equipment and processing software allowed debris locations to be tagged within an accuracy of three feet. Recovery leaders were so impressed with the capability that they installed a high-speed data line between the university and the command center so that the maps could be printed in Lufkin.26