Pat Smith said that searchers covered with scratches and cuts would come into her bank in Hemphill. “I’d say, ‘Oh, you’re walking!’ They would reply, ‘Yeah, and those wait-a-minute bushes are killing us.’ They called them that because while they were walking, someone would run into one and yell, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute!’”
Through it all, NASA was deeply impressed at the keen eyes of the fire crews during the search. “They did not miss the slightest bit,” Arriëns said of the Native Americans with whom he searched on his first day. “They’d come to me with pieces under a quarter of an inch.” Debbie Awtonomow said, “They were phenomenal. One guy saw a puddle in the woods, and he knew from experience it didn’t look right. They found a six-foot beam buried in the mud under that puddle.”
—
The Forest Service initially staged its contracted helicopters at the airports in Lufkin and Palestine.21 More than thirty helicopters were in the air at any one time over the search area, sweeping a three-mile path on each side of the ground search corridor. The Texas Forest Service flew fixed-wing aircraft over the area to coordinate air traffic. Astronauts Scott Kelly, John Herrington, Tim Kopra, Terry Virts, and Butch Wilmore took turns as NASA’s coordinators for the air search.22
The helicopter contractors had their own fuel trucks, which helped to maximize the time the choppers were deployed every day. Pilots could arrange to have the fuel truck meet them at a pasture near the day’s search area, rather than having to fly back to the airport to refuel. The spotters had time to grab a quick sandwich, and then it was time to get back into the air.
The aerial search crews usually consisted of a pilot and a helicopter manager from the Texas Forest Service in the front seats, with another Texas Forest Service or US Forest Service worker and one or two KSC engineers or technicians in the backseat to spot debris. If a clearing was nearby, the chopper could land to inspect or retrieve an item that looked particularly noteworthy. Otherwise, the crew noted the GPS location and sent a ground team to retrieve the piece of debris later. Helicopter spotters were also sometimes able to see items in areas that were inaccessible to ground searchers.23
Typical of the KSC staff flying as spotters was NASA test project engineer Mike Ciannilli, who flew with a search crew out of Palestine. He had never been in a helicopter before, but he desperately wanted to help in the search for his beloved Columbia. Several days of crippling airsickness at the beginning of his assignment almost forced him out of the role. However, someone suggested that he ask the pilot to fly with the helicopter’s doors removed. The fresh, cold breeze helped reduce his nausea, and he was able to proceed in his role.
One of the challenges in spotting shuttle debris from the air was discerning it from the junk landowners left in remote corners of their property. Bathtubs turned up in strange places. On one flight, Ciannilli spotted what appeared to be a perfect piece of white tile in a swampy area that was miles from the nearest house. He asked the pilot to set down as close as possible to it, but the only safe area to land was several hundred yards away at the edge of the woods. Ciannilli slogged downstream through water and muck to reach the item, only to discover it was a Texas license plate.
Search teams needed to be aware of unofficial “no-fly” areas in the search area. On another of Ciannilli’s flights, the pilot received a call from the airborne control plane, “Abandon your search! Abandon your search!”
Ciannilli asked, “Are we low on fuel?”
The pilot said, “It’s not safe. We might get shot at. There’s a meth lab in this area.”
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Dive teams from the FBI, EPA, coast guard, Houston police department, the Sabine River Authority, Jasper County sheriff’s office, and other local authorities had been searching the Toledo Bend Reservoir since February 1, following up on reports of large objects hitting the water. Unfortunately, dense fog covered the lake at the time of the accident, and few people were able to judge reliably where anything actually impacted. Their reports were actually classified as “ear witness” testimony.24
The only thing recovered so far from Toledo Bend was a brake from one of Columbia’s main landing gear assemblies. An FBI team found it in shallow water a few feet west of the Louisiana shoreline. Columbia’s OEX recorder had not been found on the ground. NASA suspected it might have come down along the Texas side of the lake, since other items from the forward end of the shuttle were found onshore nearby.
The US Navy took over the water search and salvage operations in Toledo Bend and Lake Nacogdoches at about the same time the national Incident Management Teams took over the ground search.25 The navy surveyed the areas of the reservoirs along the centerline of the debris path, and immediately saw the challenges they would be up against. Water temperatures were in the forties. Treetops, moss, and hydrilla just below the water’s surface restricted the depth at which salvage vessels could tow sonar devices. Suspended matter in the water limited divers’ visibility to just a few feet. Operators on the surface would need to use portable sonar devices to guide divers to areas of interest. Divers would have to wear special dry suits to protect them from potential exposure to toxic chemicals.
Searching for debris on the lake bottom was extraordinarily difficult, especially since the initial search area was over thirty-two square nautical miles of lake bed. When Toledo Bend’s dam was constructed in 1966, engineers expected it would take three years for the reservoir to fill with water. That would have allowed enough time to log the forested land and reclaim items from buildings in the reservoir. However, two back-to-back major floods caused Toledo Bend to fill up in only three months.26 There was not enough time to clear trees and remove equipment from the farms and logging operations, and all of that was now sitting at the bottom of the lake.
Consequently, the navy’s sonar picked up returns from myriad large and small metal objects on the lake bed—railroad tracks, tractors, cars, storage tanks, fence lines, and metal roofs on storage buildings. Even flat-topped tree stumps created sonar returns that appeared similar to potential targets of interest.
High winds prevented search teams from working on the lakes on February 21, 26, and March 29, but teams were otherwise in the water every day. They examined anywhere from twenty to more than one hundred targets of interest every day.
By March 2, the navy had not located any material from the shuttle in either Toledo Bend or Lake Nacogdoches. The navy asked NASA for some actual space shuttle material upon which the search teams could test their equipment. NASA provided four pieces of shuttle skin that had been recovered on land. The dive team tied the pieces to buoys and dropped them in about twenty feet of relatively clear water near the Fin and Feather Resort. The search equipment could only reliably detect the largest piece, which measured about three feet by six feet across. The reservoir was on average sixty feet deep, and more than one hundred feet deep in places. This did not bode well for finding small debris from the shuttle with the current resources. A higher-resolution sonar system brought in a few days later also had difficulty detecting small objects.
Nonetheless, analysts became proficient at identifying man-made objects in sonar scans and targeting dive teams to them. The recovered objects—none of which were from the shuttle—were proudly displayed against the wall of the dive headquarters. These trophies included a drywall bucket, anchors, outboard motors, and a refrigerator door. The materials were all about the same size and shape as the debris that NASA was most eager to find.
On March 18, NASA asked the navy to look in one area of Toledo Bend for a camera that could have recorded pictures of the shuttle’s external fuel tank. Someone said they had seen film or tapes along the edge of the reservoir, but they were lost when heavy rains raised the water level.27 Several pieces from a camera were found on the western shore, raising hopes the camera body might be in the lake.
The navy scanned the new area several times during the search for the camera. Divers spent 176 diving hours grid searching an area of about fiv
e and one-half acres. This concentrated search produced only a single, thumbnail-sized piece of shuttle skin. While searchers were no doubt frustrated to have found nothing of consequence from Columbia in Toledo Bend, they demonstrated that searches with high-tech systems were not missing any significant pieces of shuttle debris.28
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On February 18, a Sabine County resident who was four-wheeling near the bank of an inlet near Six Mile Bay on Toledo Bend spotted Columbia’s nose landing gear partially buried in the mud. That afternoon, a pickup truck brought the nose gear to the collection center at the Sabine County rodeo arena.
As Pat Adkins cleaned off the piece with a hose and scrub brush, he reflected on how bizarre the situation was. Here he was, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, washing mud off of a once-pristine piece of the shuttle. Unlike some other items of debris that were almost unrecognizable, there was no mistaking what this was. Both tires were still attached to the strut. The bead of the tires was burned off, and they were deflated, but the tires were otherwise remarkably intact. The stroke arm for the steering actuator was missing, and Adkins could see that one portion of the surface of the strut had been exposed to the heat of reentry. After cleaning it off, Adkins and several other men transferred the landing gear to the back of a semitrailer, where it could be kept secure until the next shipment of debris from Hemphill to Barksdale.
The immediately recognizable piece of the shuttle evoked strong reactions in the NASA personnel. John Grunsfeld saw it on a visit to the Hemphill area. “He was obviously sobered by being in the presence of the item,” Greg Cohrs said. “Then he told me that he had been on the last flight of Columbia.”29
On February 21, NASA’s Debbie Awtonomow came from KSC to manage Hemphill’s collection center. Pat Adkins and Gerry Schumann familiarized her with the area and then offered to show her the latest recovered items. Adkins raised the door at the back of the trailer. Awtonomow looked in and immediately saw the landing gear. The sight of the piece of the once-proud shuttle, now horribly wrecked and embedded with grass and mud, proved too much for her. She walked over to the ramp beside the truck and vomited. She broke into tears and cried for nearly an hour.
“In the back of your mind,” she later recalled, “you tell yourself that it’s just a dream, that this is not really happening. But to see this the first thing—reality hit real quick. It was like someone took a two-by-four and smacked me upside the head.”
Schumann and Adkins sat with her and comforted her. Adkins told her, “It’s not going to get any better. It’s good just to get it out of the way now. I understand.”
When she had finished crying, Schumann consoled her, “We all went through it. We all had our time that we had to break down and get it out of us, and then go on and do the job. Are you ready to go to work now?”
The long hours, tough physical conditions, and the emotional challenges of the work took their toll on our NASA workforce and the local officials. People burned out quickly. Personnel usually stayed on site for several weeks and then went home to rest and recharge. On average, between forty and fifty people rotated in and out of the area from KSC every week.30
When Stephanie Stilson took over from Tom Hoffman at the Nacogdoches hangar in late February, she could tell at the moment she arrived that “Tom was definitely ready to go. You’re working sixteen-plus hours per day, seven days a week. You can’t do that for long periods of time and be as effective as you need to be.”
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The collection centers moved into high gear as crews retrieved the debris that was tagged but not picked up in the first two weeks following the accident. By February 18, over four thousand pieces of debris had already been sent to KSC, and ten thousand more items were on their way to Barksdale from the collection centers. By March 4, the number of pieces of debris found had more than doubled. The combined ground and air searches were gathering a great deal of material that could prove important to the investigation.31
Each ground search team usually located and retrieved between two and fifty pounds of debris every day.32 Landowners were also still uncovering material on their properties. On February 13, a man plowing his field in Littlefield, Texas, north of Lubbock, found a small piece of tile. The “Littlefield Tile” turned out to be the westernmost piece of Columbia recovered—nearly three hundred miles farther west than any other item of debris—despite searches in every state between Texas and the Pacific Ocean. Columbia shed this piece of tile from its left wing about one minute before the vehicle completely disintegrated.
At the other end of the debris field, one of the space shuttle main engine turbopumps was pulled out of the mud at Fort Polk, Louisiana, on February 15. Another was found on March 30 and retrieved on April 1. Still traveling supersonically when they impacted the ground after the accident, the heavy pieces of machinery buried themselves fourteen feet deep. These dense engine components flew farther than any debris after the shuttle broke up, and their trajectory was unaffected by winds aloft. The path from the point where the shuttle broke up near Palestine to where the powerheads impacted near Fort Polk defined the initial centerline of the debris search effort.
In Sabine County, René Arriëns and Debbie Awtonomow responded one day to a report of a cassette tape stuck in the upper branches of a tree. Awtonomow first thought someone had thrown it from a passing car. Then it struck her: How could it have ended up in the top of a tree unless it fell from the sky? They retrieved the case and as much of the tape as they could. The case was scorched, but some of the tape appeared to be intact. It was a personal music cassette from one of Columbia’s crew.
Some of the experiments from Columbia’s Spacehab module survived reentry and made it to the ground. Pat Adkins responded to a call from a woman who found bags with aluminum cylinders hanging in the trees at a far corner of her property. On another occasion, Adkins wondered aloud to an EPA colleague whether any of the fish eggs on an experiment in the Spacehab module survived the accident. The EPA man blanched and said, “Oh my God, don’t tell me that! I can just imagine a fish species that isn’t native to Texas coming in and taking over.”
Back at the collection centers in the evening, NASA personnel sorted through the material collected during the day’s search. The initial triage consisted of segregating things into “definitely shuttle material” and “definitely not shuttle material” boxes. One piece of rusted steel in Sabine County appeared to be from a pickup truck. The man who first examined it tossed it in the “definitely not” box, because he did not believe any steel was on the shuttle. However, Arriëns knew the shuttle’s landing gear strut was made mostly of steel, and he recognized the mechanism right away. It turned out to be a critical find—one of the first pieces of the shuttle to be exposed to plasma during reentry.33
Another piece that came in was a shard of something that looked like polished metal. No one could figure out what it was. Then the person holding it accidentally dropped it onto the pavement, and it broke. It was a fragment of glass coated on all sides with melted aluminum. Pieces with this kind of metal deposition would be crucial in reconstructing the sequence of events in Columbia’s breakup.34
Searchers near Powell, Texas, found one tile with puzzling orange deposits in jagged grooves on the surface of the tile. The markings did not appear to be reentry damage, but it was unclear whether the orange deposits were from foam that came off the shuttle’s external tank. Whatever the cause, it supported the hypothesis that something collided with the shuttle in flight, although the idea of a collision during reentry was later debunked.
NASA’s “fault tree” had been pruned by early March to the extent that there were now only ten different failure scenarios that might explain how heat had entered Columbia’s left wing. The leading edge of the left wing was the primary focus, but engineers still could not rule out a burn-through from the bottom of the wing. More hard evidence was needed.
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On March 19, firefighter Jeremy Willoughby was searching with
the “Florida 3” fire crew, one of several crews from Florida deployed to an area in San Augustine County, Texas, where material from the shuttle’s crew module came down. Willoughby’s crew was walking that morning through a pine stand on a gradual slope, when someone saw a metal box on the ground next to a small crater, where it had impacted and bounced. “It was just laying there like, ‘Here I am!’” said Willoughby. The box was wrapped up and placed into the back of a pickup truck along with other items the crews found that morning.
Greg Cohrs and the FBI’s Terry Lane were riding around to check on the progress of the day’s searches in Sabine and San Augustine Counties. At the Magnolia Church staging area in San Augustine County, they looked in the back of a pickup truck holding material collected by the Florida crews. Cohrs immediately recognized what appeared to be an important piece of equipment, wrapped in a plastic bag. He thought it might be the shuttle’s Orbiter Experiments (OEX) recorder, but he was not certain. He asked the group supervisor what he thought it was, hoping the supervisor would voice the same opinion. However, the box looked a little different from the photograph that NASA had used to alert searchers, and neither the group supervisor nor his on-site NASA counterparts seemed overly excited about it.
Convinced that NASA managers would want to see the component immediately—whatever it was—Cohrs and Lane took possession of the box and drove it directly to the collection center in Hemphill.
At the collection center, Cohrs and Lane watched as the staff removed the box from its bag and cleaned it off. Considering the box had survived hypersonic reentry from two hundred thousand feet in altitude and had been exposed to the elements for seven weeks, it appeared to be in remarkably good shape. Even its government property sticker was still intact. Cohrs noticed only a few damaged places, such as where connectors had broken off of the back of the case.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 19
