Many of NASA’s searchers were reluctant to fly in helicopters after the accident. They felt it was too dangerous. The NTSB reminded the leaders in Lufkin that it made no sense to risk people’s lives in a debris salvage operation. FEMA suggested terminating the air search efforts altogether.
NASA was reluctant to abandon the air operations, though. The leadership team eventually worked out a compromise that would enable them to continue helicopter searches safely. First, flights were to be at a higher altitude, to give the pilots time to recover from emergency situations and find a clear place to land. Second, there would be no more landings to pick up debris. Spotters were to note an object’s position and call in a ground search team. Finally, operations would be concentrated farther to the west in the debris field, where there was less forest, and where debris from Columbia’s left wing and aft structure was more likely to be found. With these changes made to the mission profile, air searches resumed on April 10.9
The accident also resulted in three safety recommendations from the NTSB to the FAA addressing the problem that caused the crash. As a result, no further crashes of Bell 407 helicopters have occurred worldwide due to the same type of failure.10
Even with the temporary stand-down in helicopter flights, the search effort continued at an intense pace. Everyone was still incredibly busy, but gone was the sense of chaos from the first weeks of the recovery effort.11 As time went by, the areas of interest in the ground search changed. The first six weeks’ searches were focused in the area between Nacogdoches and Hemphill. By April, the emphasis had shifted to the area around Corsicana, where pieces of the shuttle’s tile and wing leading edge materials were being discovered.12
The results were incredible. By April 7, more than sixty thousand pieces of shuttle debris—totaling 70,700 pounds—had been collected from the field and transported to Kennedy Space Center. Of the 137 tanks and cylinders with hazardous materials on board Columbia, 76 had been recovered. Ground searchers had covered 77 percent of the assigned acreage in Texas and Louisiana. Water searches in Toledo Bend were 99.5 percent complete. Aerial searches were on temporary hold following the March 27 accident, but 76 percent of the assigned aerial grids had already been searched.
The personnel staffing snapshot on April 7 showed 5,545 people working in search operations. This included 683 EPA, 75 FEMA, 282 NASA, and 4,289 US Forest Service personnel engaged in the ground search; air operations had fifty-five people assigned; and 130 people were working on diving operations. The Texas Forest Service had twenty-two people assigned, and there were a few other resources from DOD, DOT, and the Texas Department of Emergency Management.13
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STS-114, the space shuttle’s next planned mission, was on hold but not canceled. NASA did not yet know when the mission might fly—it could be a matter of months or years. In the meantime, astronaut Eileen Collins, the mission’s commander, needed to keep her crew focused, engaged, and working as a team.
Although they could not commit to a long-term assignment, she hoped that her crew might be able to do something to help the Columbia recovery effort. Collins asked Jim Wetherbee and Dom Gorie if the STS-114 crew could walk a search one day. They agreed that it would be a positive way to show the astronaut office’s support and gratitude for the ground search. It would also demonstrate NASA’s intention to fly the shuttle again as soon as possible.
Collins and her crewmates Jim Kelly and Soichi Noguchi flew into Nacogdoches Airport on Thursday, April 10. After a tour of the collection facility and a safety orientation, they went to a search site.14
They were told in advance about the physical conditions to expect in the field, but Collins was uncertain about what the emotional state of the search teams would be. She had attended all of the funerals and memorial services for the Columbia crew. She expected people working the recovery effort to be grim or sad. Much to her surprise, she found the search crews and her NASA colleagues upbeat. “I realized that you just can’t be looking at a funeral all those weeks,” she said. “You’ve got to start living again.”
Collins, Kelly, and Noguchi walked with searchers for about two hours. Noguchi found a piece of tile. Collins felt somewhat disappointed not to find anything herself, despite being intensely focused on the ground around her. She thought it might have helped her gain some measure of closure with her friends who perished on Columbia.
Collins and crew then flew to Lufkin. That evening, they gave a presentation at the Civic Center for the Lufkin community, showing videos about the space shuttle and the International Space Station. The crew distributed stickers of their mission patch and signed photos for the attendees. Once again, it was a way for NASA to thank the residents of East Texas for their extraordinary support and sacrifices in the cause of manned spaceflight.15
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On April 23, five Columbia crew spouses came to East Texas to thank the recovery teams and to visit the area where the crew’s remains were found. Jan Amen of the Texas Forest Service was one of the drivers for the group. After they toured the Nacogdoches collection center, Amen escorted Lani McCool and Rona Ramon to the Hemphill area. FBI special agents Terry Lane and Ed Zalomski accompanied them. The other spouses stayed in the Nacogdoches area to meet with some of the recovery teams.16
The landowner on whose property Ilan Ramon’s remains were found had been informed that Mrs. Ramon was coming to see the site. In preparation for her visit, he built an access road through the woods to the recovery area—at his own expense—to ease her journey.17
Brother Fred Raney met with Mrs. McCool and Mrs. Ramon and told them how their loved ones had been cared for in the “chapel in the woods.” Brother Fred said, “I wanted them to know that they were being thought of during that whole time.”
Jan Amen wrote to a friend of her experience that day: “Who gets to do that? I was so humbled by that honor.”
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The navy wrapped up its operations on April 13. The only two Columbia debris objects retrieved from Toledo Bend Reservoir were the landing gear brake assembly found by the FBI on February 10 and the thumbnail-sized piece of shuttle skin found in March. Dive teams were unable to locate any debris in Lake Nacogdoches.
The navy knew going into the operation that the cards were stacked against their finding anything in the reservoirs. Despite the challenges, the navy brought its highest skilled personnel and most sophisticated search equipment to the scene and worked continuously for two months.
The navy concluded that despite the “ear witness” reports, it appeared that no large, intact sections of the shuttle landed in the lakes in the primary search area. Smaller pieces may have fallen into the lakes, but they could not be located with current technology and within time and resource constraints. And short of draining the lakes—which was clearly impracticable—it was impossible to find smaller debris.18
In a sense, it was a good thing that the navy did not find shuttle material in the lakes. NASA could be relatively certain that nothing toxic or of potentially significant value to the investigation was still underwater.
The remarkably efficient ground and air searches cleared the debris field on schedule. By mid-April, Dave Whittle said, “It was becoming obvious that we were not finding the big parts anymore, and the smaller stuff probably provides less information than the big stuff does. And we were also looking at our maps and seeing we were about finished.”
It was time to begin closing down the search effort.
One of FEMA’s three primary objectives for the operation was to return the disaster area to the condition it was in prior to the accident. Whittle and his colleagues met with each of the Texas county judges from the affected counties to ensure they felt that things had returned to normal. Whittle also made certain the judges understood how to reach NASA’s Columbia Recovery Office at KSC if anything else turned up in their communities.
On April 18, Palestine became the first camp to close. A few days later in Hemphill, Choctaw firefighters from Oklahoma
staged a Native fellowship or victory dance in the VFW hall to celebrate the successful completion of the search in Sabine and San Augustine Counties. Then Hemphill’s camp and collection center closed on April 22.
The place felt eerily silent after three months of nonstop activity. After ensuring that everything had been cleaned up properly, Greg Cohrs went home and became sick for nearly a week. Just as had happened up to the point that the last of Columbia’s crew members were recovered, Cohrs said, “My exhausted and drained body was able to resist illness until I completed the work.”19
On Pat Adkins’s last day in Hemphill before he returned to KSC, he walked around the downtown area and visited every shop. He tried to buy something in each shop as a small way to say “thank you” for the way everyone in town had taken such good care of him.
Search operations continued for a short time in the western end of the debris field, until the number of identifiable shuttle pieces being recovered dropped to less than one per grid.20 At this point, the CAIB had already announced their conclusions as to the root cause of the accident. Additional material recovered was not likely to change those conclusions.
All ground search operations in Texas ended by April 30, and the remaining fire crews demobilized on May 1. The Nacogdoches site closed down on May 3, and Corsicana closed on May 4. The Longview staging area shuttered its operations on May 7.21
Limited search operations moved to Utah starting on May 2. Teams spent about eight days trying to find an object tracked by radar after falling off Columbia. They were unable to locate the object or any other debris from the shuttle in their search.
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NASA’s Space Flight Awareness organization sponsored a huge dinner in Lufkin on April 29 to celebrate the end of recovery operations.
The event was held in Lufkin’s Civic Center, where the emergency operations center was established on the afternoon of the accident. Huge posters from KSC and the recovery sites hung on the walls. Tables and chairs were draped with gold covers. The scale of the event was impressive—a party only Texans can throw—feeling to Ed Mango like the celebration scene in the movie The Right Stuff.
Jan Amen reported, “Dinner was steak and chicken, green beans, rice, rolls, salad, pie, all prepared by the Diboll Country Club. Free drinks flowed freely.”22
Administrator O’Keefe hosted the event for NASA, and Scott Wells spoke on behalf of FEMA. County judges and civic leaders from every county in East Texas were on hand. Judge Jack Leath, Tom Maddox, Greg Cohrs, Roger and Belinda Gay, Marsha Cooper, and a host of other people represented Sabine County. Dignitaries from the various Native American Tribes and Nations attended. An astronaut sat at every table.
Dom Gorie opened the ceremony with a heartfelt invocation that brought tears to the eyes of nearly everyone present. The Expedition Six crew sent a live video message from the International Space Station. A video about the Columbia crew followed.
O’Keefe and Dave King presented plaques recognizing the nation’s appreciation for the contributions of the people at every table in the hall. The spouses of Columbia’s crew spoke of their gratitude to the people of East Texas for bringing their loved ones home again. Eileen Collins closed the ceremony on behalf of the next shuttle crew scheduled to fly in space.23
It was a fitting and emotional close to a tumultuous three months. The people of East Texas had provided the nation and the world with an enduring lesson in how to handle a crisis with dignity, compassion, and competence.
At the end of the evening, after Jan Amen dropped off her last load of astronauts and families at their hotels, she emailed to a friend, “I absolutely lost it. I squalled all the way back to Cudlipp like a big fat crybaby. I’m whooped!”
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The largest land search-and-recovery operation in United States history had finally ended. This was the first incident under the overall auspices of the new Department of Homeland Security, and about 450 federal, state, and local agencies and volunteer organizations worked together in a textbook example of interagency cooperation and collaboration with local communities.
In the weeks between February 1 and May 10, 2003, nearly twenty-five thousand men and women searched 680,750 acres of land—in essence, walking every square foot of an area roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. The US Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and state forestry organizations and contractors provided most of the searchers, particularly after February 17.
Aircrews logged five thousand flight hours and painstakingly searched 1.6 million acres, an area nearly 50 percent larger than the state of Delaware. The helicopter searches were crucial in determining what caused the Columbia accident. Helicopter spotters located 65 percent of the 2,700 shuttle components that eventually ended up on the grid of the reconstruction hangar.24
Divers from the navy, FBI, Houston police department, EPA, Texas DPS, and the Galveston police department conducted more than three thousand dives and spent more than eight hundred hours on the bottom of lakes searching for debris from Columbia.25 The overall water search effort covered twenty-three square miles of lake bed.
The combined efforts of these remarkable women and men totaled 1.5 million man-hours.26 They recovered nearly eighty-four thousand pieces of Columbia, with a combined weight of 84,700 pounds. That was equal to about 38 percent of the shuttle’s landing weight. Some of the most critical pieces recovered included the OEX recorder, more than 90 percent of the crew module, and pieces of the heatshield and structure from the left wing and the left side of the orbiter. Every piece of debris recovered was cataloged. This material would provide vital information on how the accident occurred and how the shuttle’s structure was affected as the vehicle broke up.27
Most emotionally important to the NASA family, the remains of all of Columbia’s crew were recovered from the field and returned to their loved ones for interment.
The question remained, though: Could the space shuttle fleet be made safe enough to fly again?
Chapter 11
RECONSTRUCTING COLUMBIA
Only a few days into the recovery period in early February, we realized we needed a place to lay out Columbia’s debris in order to reconstruct the accident. NASA’s management selected Kennedy Space Center as the best place for that to happen. The people chosen to put Columbia back together—an unprecedented task—would be the technicians and engineers at KSC. They were the people who had cared for her daily for the previous twenty-three years. The reconstruction ended up being a collaborative effort of many NASA centers, but Kennedy was the lead.
Even though I was selected to head the overall reconstruction effort on February 9, things were already well under way at Kennedy when I returned home from Barksdale a few days later. This was thanks to the hard work of shuttle test director Steve Altemus. Altemus happened to be walking by an office on February 3 when he overheard someone being offered—and then turning down—the role of Columbia reconstruction director. Altemus volunteered on the spot. He had fifteen years of experience in all aspects of shuttle launch, operations, and landing, as well as emergency management. He was the perfect person for the job.
We divided our duties, with me as the “up and out” manager—dealing with the reconstruction effort’s interfaces to management, the CAIB, the press, congressional visitors and other VIPs, and other NASA centers—and Altemus leading the “down and in” day-to-day operations. We knew each other well, having worked together for many years. We made a strong leadership team with complementary skills.
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The Reusable Launch Vehicle hangar at the southeast end of the Shuttle Landing Facility was only being used for storage in early 2003. It was the perfect size, secure, and convenient. Although it was on NASA property, the state of Florida owned the hangar. We quickly secured a short-term lease as soon as we got the “Go” to stage the reconstruction at Kennedy.
Getting everything set up in less than two
weeks, before the first truckloads of debris were due to arrive, was not going to be an easy task. The hangar’s leaky roof needed to be fixed. Processes for receiving, decontaminating, categorizing, and cataloging the debris had to be developed. Someone had to build an area for reconstructing the crew module. Much to Altemus’s relief, KSC director Roy Bridges promised him the unconditional, immediate support of all of KSC’s organizations for whatever he needed to ensure the reconstruction happened smoothly. Altemus would not have to contend with any bureaucratic hassles.
The technical term for the process the NTSB proposed was “reconstruction,” but this was not going to be an attempt to rebuild the ship from her wreckage. Rather, we would lay out the recovered debris on a floor plan representing the shuttle peeled open onto a two-dimensional grid, with the shuttle’s entire outer surface and the wing structures facing upward. By placing the recovered pieces of the shuttle next to one another, as they would have been on the ship, investigators could look for patterns in the debris that might indicate how Columbia was damaged and came apart.
Under NTSB’s guidance, NASA and Boeing Air Safety used yellow tape to lay out a dimensioned grid on the hangar floor, with a blue tape outline of the shuttle’s sections superimposed over it. The NTSB suggested that the outline and grid be 10 percent larger than the actual shuttle. Additionally, the major component areas were separated from each other by about three feet. This would provide room for people to walk around between structures and examine the debris from all angles. The blue tape outline was oriented as if the shuttle had been pulled into the hangar nose first. From there, the outline was drawn as if the shuttle was turned belly side up and splayed out into two dimensions. Each wing was outlined in three separate sections: lower surface tiles, lower surface structure, and upper surface tiles. The idea was that when enough debris was available, placing the lower surface tiles over the lower surface structure would enable engineers to study those components in contact with one another.1
Bringing Columbia Home Page 21
