Local wireless companies had by now set up temporary cell phone towers at each of the debris collection centers. For the first time, the debris teams had reliable cell phone coverage—at least near the storage areas. United Space Alliance began issuing cell phones to everyone deployed to Texas for the recovery. This was an unusual practice in 2003, when companies typically only provided cell phones to senior executives.46
FEMA’s Scott Wells publicly thanked volunteer agencies that had been providing coffee, meals, snacks, and morale-sustaining support that warmed the spirits of personnel in the field and recovery offices. Recognizing the tremendous progress made during the first week to bring the human remains and debris recovery operations under control, FEMA’s Deputy Director, Michael Brown, acknowledged interagency cooperation as the key to success of the recovery efforts to date.47
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One of the crew remains search teams had found a cockpit window frame from Columbia deep in the Sabine County National Forest on Saturday, but they were unable to retrieve the heavy item. Gerry Schumann took the six members of his debris response team out to the woods to retrieve the frame on Sunday. After parking on the main road as close as they could get to the object’s GPS coordinates, his team had to trudge more than a mile into the woods to find the piece. The team spent nearly the entire day carrying the metal frame out of the forest—taking turns lifting it by its corners, setting it down when people got tired, and maneuvering it around briar patches. Eventually, the team wrestled it back to their truck.
Schumann was elated that his team successfully retrieved the item after such an ordeal. After delivering the window to the Hemphill collection center, he bragged about the accomplishment.
Don Eddings, Marsha Cooper, and several other US Forest Service people on hand at the command post seemed unimpressed. Eddings asked, “Was that you guys that brought that window in?”
Schumann said, “Yes! Great find. It took us all day to get that thing out.”
Eddings said, “All you smart-asses had to do was ask us. There’s a fire road near there. We could have drove you guys within fifty yards of it.”
Schumann initially felt both angry and deflated, like he had been made to look foolish and that he had wasted so much effort. When he calmed down, he realized this was a wake-up call. The NASA staff’s vast technical expertise was not always useful here. It was no substitute for the on-the-ground knowledge that the local residents had of their county, its forests, and its back roads. On such matters, he was completely ignorant.
There was no shame in asking for help.
From that time forward, Schumann did not hesitate to ask the US Forest Service personnel for assistance whenever he needed to get to a location deep in the woods. He and Eddings formed a fast friendship that persists to this day.48
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The data team from Johnson and our debris team from Kennedy continued to clarify our roles and responsibilities regarding material recovered in the field. JSC agreed that after they had checked recording devices to see if they contained any data, the items would be sent onward to Kennedy for physical analysis. Crew photos and other audiovisual records would be considered unrelated to the reconstruction, and sent to the Flight Crew Operations directorate in Houston. Any recovered personal items, such as jewelry, were to be deposited with the FBI for secure storage, sent directly to the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy for processing, and then returned expeditiously to the crew’s families. Personal flight equipment (seats, buckles, pieces of suits, and so forth) were to go directly to KSC for processing, but would be retained by NASA for the investigation.
On February 10, we drafted a memo of understanding such that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board had to concur before any piece of Columbia was subjected to testing, particularly destructive testing. This ensured evidence was preserved for the accident investigation—which, Administrator O’Keefe and Admiral Gehman told the press, they expected to complete in about sixty days.
Every collection center had already sent—or was preparing to send—shipments of recovered material to Barksdale. One truck from Palestine carried 276 items. Another truck was en route from Nacogdoches with ninety-three items. More than eleven hundred were still in the hangar there, awaiting transport. A truck from San Augustine was bearing forty boxes of material, which included a hydrazine tank that had not been decontaminated, a laptop disk drive, the faceplate from one of the shuttle’s computers, a seat frame, one of the window frames, and a large piece of an external tank disconnect door. A truck was scheduled to leave Hemphill on Tuesday with more than two hundred items, including the frames to the six forward cockpit windows and a maneuvering thruster. Seventy-six packages of material, with nearly three hundred fifty items, were on their way from Jasper. One of these items was cockpit control panel A12, which came from the aft flight deck.
Although the Jasper collection center was full, very little additional material was being recovered nearby. We directed the Jasper site be closed once the last items in storage there were shipped to Barksdale.
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The debris team in Lufkin brainstormed ways to locate debris from Columbia’s left wing in the area around Carswell, near the western end of the debris field, since most of the ground search forces were committed to looking for Columbia’s crew in Hemphill and San Augustine. Blimps, hang gliders, and powered parachutes were among the options discussed. The Civil Air Patrol had already made nine possible sightings from the air.
Teams from Alliant Aviation flew power-chutes (basically go-karts suspended from parachutes) over the debris field. On February 10, one group located a large piece of one of Columbia’s main landing gear doors on the ground. They landed nearby and directed a ground search crew to the location near Nacogdoches.
That night, they reported the find to Jeff Williams at the Forest Resources Institute, who was attempting to use satellite imagery to assist in the search-and-recovery effort. Williams discovered that he was able to see the gear door through the treetops on a recent classified IKONOS satellite image of the area. Williams was subsequently able to use this knowledge and his image interpretation skills to guide searchers to particular areas, based on what appeared to be broken tree crowns and branches that he could discern in the satellite images.49
Water search crews from the coast guard, FBI, and local police forces were still at work in Toledo Bend Reservoir and the Sam Rayburn Reservoir.50 Following up on an eyewitness report, an FBI dive team retrieved one of the shuttle’s landing gear brake assemblies from the water on the Louisiana shore of Toledo Bend.51 Astronauts had been guiding the dive teams, directing the search assets, and investigating reported sightings. The astronauts realized they were out of their element in managing such a huge effort and needed expert help to run the water search operation. After touring the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the previous day, the navy formally offered to lead the water search efforts.52
Most of the possible debris sightings in California, Nevada, and Arizona had been investigated and closed out. No debris had yet been found west of Texas, even though amateur videos clearly showed as many as a dozen instances of pieces coming off from the shuttle between the California coastline and when it broke up near Dallas.53
Questions began to arise on the appropriate level of effort to be spent recovering debris. Once the critical pieces of wreckage had been collected—and many still remained somewhere out there—how much more of Columbia needed to be recovered?
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One of our priority pieces from Columbia’s underside had arrived at Barksdale—the “sawtooth doubler.” This two-foot by two-foot plate—roughly in the shape of the orbiter itself—had been bonded underneath the orbiter and then covered with tiles. Because the shuttle’s skin was uneven where the doubler was mounted, the tiles covering that part had to be thinner than the surrounding tiles so that the exterior surface of the tiles was smooth. Thinner tiles might not stand up well to the heat of reentry, so it was important to assess the condition
of this piece. It was one of the key items in the fault tree of possible failure modes.
Technicians and engineers at Barksdale saw the doubler was badly scorched and melted around the edges. Entirely by coincidence, one of the people processing the piece was the man who had installed it on Columbia in the first place.
It devastated him. Sobbing uncontrollably, this member of our KSC team held the piece in his hands and showed it to me. He was convinced that he was responsible for the loss of Columbia and its crew. Frank Travassos, a main propulsion system expert from KSC, and I took him outside. We tried to console him and reassure him that the accident was not his fault.
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The next day, February 11, another key item on the accident fault tree had been recovered—a pyrotechnic device from the left landing gear. The pyro had fired, which would have occurred as part of the normal sequence to lower the landing gear. What we didn’t know was whether the pyro had fired before the orbiter broke up or afterward. One of the last signals received from Columbia indicated that the left landing gear was down and locked. We were almost positive that this was a spurious reading because of heat damage to wiring inside the left wing, but we needed to examine this physical evidence as confirmation.
Meanwhile, Ralph Roe from the Orbiter Project Office was already thinking about ways to test the stiffness of the wing’s leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon panels, another possible point of failure. He formed a team to investigate what kinds of changes to Columbia’s exterior surfaces could create the subtle drag that appeared to be causing some unusual movement of the ship’s control surfaces before the orbiter broke up. Data showed Columbia’s steering thrusters were firing continuously—apparently trying to counteract drag on the left wing—just before the orbiter broke up. Roe was also interested in determining what kind of environmental changes could cause a breach of the seal on the left landing gear door.
My boss at KSC suggested Ed Mango be formally freed up from reporting to Barksdale so that he could concentrate on his work in the field. In effect, this was already happening. Mango had quickly become a key member of the leadership team at Lufkin, and I easily agreed.
In another management move that day, I learned I was going home to KSC in the next few days. Shuttle Program manager Ron Dittemore, at Barksdale with Linda Ham for a tour of the facility, asked me to return to KSC as soon as possible to head up the reconstruction effort. I was excited to be able to take on a new challenge. Being at the center of the action and solving problems energized me. Barksdale was definitely on the periphery now, and things there had become relatively routine. KSC’s shuttle ground operations manager Dean Schaaf would be taking over for me. I knew I would be leaving things in good hands.
Later that day, I walked by the hangar where workers were carefully crating the shuttle material collected so far. They loaded the boxes onto two tractor trailers for transport to Kennedy Space Center. I watched the trucks pull away.
As I gazed at the wooden crates, a profoundly sad thought suddenly struck me: Columbia is going home in a coffin.
It seemed such a strange coincidence that the first pieces of Columbia herself would start going home to Kennedy Space Center on the same day that the last of Columbia’s crew members also left Barksdale for their eventual return home.
And now I would also be returning home—to receive Columbia’s wreckage, and try to determine the cause of the accident from it.
Chapter 9
WALKERS, DIVERS, AND SPOTTERS
With the news from Hemphill that the final Columbia astronaut had been recovered on February 11, the search effort now lacked the urgency of finding the crew. Meanwhile, the rest of the country was on war footing, preparing to invade Iraq. Rumors abounded that Homeland Security would raise the alert level in the coming days or hours. The National Guard was going to be recalled from the search effort immediately, taking with them their hundreds of searchers and their Blackhawk helicopters. The remaining makeshift search teams had done their job remarkably well despite the cold, rain, and rough conditions.
But critical pieces of the shuttle still remained missing, without which NASA might never know for certain what caused the Columbia accident.
On the evening of February 11, the leadership team in Lufkin discussed their options for continuing the search for Columbia’s widely scattered debris within the ten-mile-wide, two-hundred-fifty-mile-long debris path. NASA’s Dave King worried it was too inefficient and dangerous to continue to put volunteers and law enforcement officers in harm’s way searching a huge area in an undertaking that was likely to take several months.
The experiences of the previous eleven days exposed logistical weaknesses in the search effort. It would be unreasonable to expect the local incident managers to continue to run things for the next several months. Many of them had day jobs, unrelated to their work in incident management, to which they needed to return. It was impossible to find and train the huge number of local volunteers and other searchers needed for a sustained effort. Finally, the small towns of East Texas could not be expected to continue to endure the hardship of supporting hundreds or thousands of searchers for months.
Astronauts Dom Gorie and Jerry Ross were still figuring how to wrap their arms around the huge scope of the debris recovery effort. As they sifted through the problem, it became clear that they needed to organize operations in much the same way that Jim Wetherbee had organized the search for the crew—with officers appointed to the lead ground, water, and air search components. The US Navy had just agreed to take on water search operations, but who could provide the resources for the air and ground operations?
From the very outset of the crisis, local leaders who had large-scale incident management experience saw that this was going to be a long-term operation, based on the size of the debris field, the terrain, and the thousands of pieces of the shuttle that made it to the ground. Several of them, including Olen Bean, Marcus Beard, and Mark Stanford, suggested to FEMA that US Forest Service incident management teams (IMTs) could run the search efficiently utilizing wildland fire crews.
Their suggestions did not gain an immediate foothold, at least not until late in the second week of February.1 It seemed illogical to NASA and FEMA to bring in wildland firefighting crews for a search-and-recovery operation. Perhaps it was interagency unfamiliarity with what IMTs and fire crews could actually do and the types of incidents in which they had already performed admirably.
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group, with membership from nine federal agencies, used IMTs to manage responses to large-scale fires and other major natural and man-made disasters. But those IMTs were not just professional firefighters. Their support structure included leaders and members from federal, state, and local agencies who dealt with an amazing array of “all-hazard” incidents. In addition to containing large-scale wildfires, they provided assistance in such diverse situations as search and rescue following the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, containing the Exotic Newcastle Disease (avian flu) outbreak in Nevada in 2003, and disaster recovery in areas devastated by hurricanes and floods.
When it became clear that the National Guard was being pulled from the Columbia search operation in the ramp-up to the Iraq War, Mark Stanford of the Texas Forest Service and Marc Rounsaville of the US Forest Service once again proposed that NASA and FEMA run the debris searches with IMTs managing US Forest Service fire crews.2 This time, the circumstances were such that Stanford and Rounsaville’s proposal looked very attractive. Dave King, Scott Wells, and Dave Whittle began to consider the idea seriously.
Stanford and Rounsaville pointed out the US Forest Service IMTs deployed as completely self-contained units and could be on-site within a matter of days. They brought their own tents, equipment, clothing, food, portable toilets, shower facilities, transportation, cooks, accountants, command organization—everything they needed to set up operations wherever their presence was required. IMTs normally utilized elite Type 1 “hotshot” crews an
d Type 2 fire crews to respond to complex incidents.3 Each crew was staffed by twenty able-bodied, disciplined, and motivated men and women who were already trained in the practice of grid searching in remote areas. Hundreds of such crews existed across the country, with thousands of potential searchers. They would only need orientation in what to look for and how to handle what they found in the field.
Wells, Gorie, and Ross were intrigued. They asked Stanford how many people the US Forest Service could bring in. He said that the wildland fire service could bring in one thousand firefighters within a few days. Gorie and Ross immediately asked, “How about a thousand more?” Stanford said it could be done, but it might take another few days. When Gorie and Ross pushed for yet another thousand firefighters, Stanford pointed out that since February was not fire season, many personnel in the seasonal fire crews were currently off duty. They would have to be mobilized, but it would only take a few days. The good news was that they were unlikely to be pulled away from the search to fight wildland fires elsewhere at this time of year.
Gorie was impressed. He said, “It was miraculous. I had no idea anything like that could ever be generated just for this effort.”
Then came the question as to how to organize the search to maximize the probability of finding debris of a certain size, while keeping the resources and time required at a reasonable level. NASA’s database indicated about 75 percent of the ten thousand pieces of material found so far was within two miles of the centerline of the debris path. Gorie asked that the Texas Forest Service run calculations for finding an object six inches square, which would be typical for a piece of tile on the shuttle’s underside. Their analysis showed that a search line of people spaced five to ten feet apart—basically at just about fingertip distance—could find about 75 percent of such pieces on the ground if they searched two miles on either side of the centerline. To increase the likelihood of finding the occasional outliers, helicopters could survey the area on five miles on either side of the centerline. This ten-mile-wide path encompassed 95 percent of the debris already in the database.4 Finally, water teams would search within two miles of the centerline in Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 17
