Michael Leinbach - Bringing Columbia Home - The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

I called my wife Charlotte and asked her to check my “TAL packing list,” pack my suitcase, and bring it to Kennedy. I saw her shortly after lunchtime. I hugged her tight, not knowing when I would see her again.

Accident Plus Two Hours

Billy Ted Smith was the emergency management coordinator for the East Texas Mutual Aid Association, which included Jasper, Sabine, and Newton Counties. He phoned Sheriff Maddox to say that he was on his way to Hemphill with Jasper sheriff Billy Rowles, Jasper police chief Mark Allen, and several other men. They joined Maddox, Doug Hamilton, Olen Bean of the Texas Forest Service, Sabine County Judge Jack Leath, and representatives of Jasper, Newton, and Sabine Counties in Hemphill to set up an incident command post.

Maddox initially considered locating the command post at the Bronson fire hall, close to where the first partial crew remains had been found. However, Hemphill offered somewhat better communications, although the town’s facilities would likely still be inadequate.

Hemphill was a rural town of about eleven hundred residents in a county with a total population of about ten thousand souls. Its infrastructure would shortly be stretched to the limit. In early 2003, the community had only two high-speed T1 Internet lines. Maddox ordered two drops to be run from the high school’s T1 line to the fire station. Only one phone line ran into the firehouse. Maddox called the phone company and ordered ten lines to be installed immediately. Before the installation was complete, he requested that the number of lines be increased to twenty—then to thirty.

Maddox ordered all of Sabine County’s emergency personnel to report for duty. Firemen removed trucks and equipment from the fire station bays and parked everything across the street. People went to work setting up the command post. Two inmates in the town jail were carpenters. Maddox directed them to pick up plywood and two-by-fours and start building work cubicles.

Cecil Paul Mott, Hemphill’s electrical supervisor, was called in to upgrade the electrical service to the fire hall. After installing outlets, he had to replace the transformer outside the firehouse. By the time the week was over, he had filled all the power poles in the town center to capacity. He resorted to hanging transformers and lines from trees.

Fifty miles to the west, Jeff Millslagle arrived at Lufkin’s FBI office shortly after ten o’clock. The assistant US attorney was on hand, as were all of the area’s FBI agents. Phones were ringing incessantly. The agents discussed what the FBI’s role should be. Their first concerns were to determine whether anyone on the ground was injured by falling debris and whether the shuttle had been shot down or sabotaged.

Millslagle sent agents Terry Lane and Shane Ball to Hemphill and dispatched Glenn Martin to San Augustine. Most of the debris calls were coming from those two areas.

US marshals and representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived at the office, as did more people from the US Attorneys Office. It was clear that the FBI’s office was too small to serve as the central coordinating location. Brit Featherstone from the US Attorneys Office made several calls and secured the Lufkin Civic Center for use as an incident command post.

Back at the FBI office in Tyler, Pete Galbraith was having difficulty getting the attention of his superiors and conveying the urgent need to deploy more FBI support to the scene. “What’s this got to do with counterterrorism?” was their initial response. They seemed unable to grasp the severity of the problem.

Millslagle phoned his superiors in Denton and received similar pushback. Millslagle said, “I don’t think you guys get how big this thing is about to become.”

Meanwhile, Jack Colley, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Division of Emergency Management, phoned Mark Stanford, chief of fire operations for the Texas Forest Service. Stanford had extensive experience in implementing the incident command system (ICS) to manage large all-hazard incidents. While the Texas Forest Service might lack the technical expertise to deal with the accident itself, the incident command framework provided a support structure for managing the response to a complex public safety situation. Colley knew of Stanford’s experience and asked him to get to Lufkin as quickly as possible to take control and coordinate the agencies that were responding to the accident.

Accident Plus Two Hours and Thirty Minutes

Scott Wells was deployed in Jonesboro, Arkansas, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on-site incident commander. Wells was a military veteran with twenty-four years of service. He left the military in 1999 to become part of FEMA’s original cadre of federal coordinating officers. On February 1, he was helping the Jonesboro community recover from power outages resulting from a severe ice storm earlier in the winter.

He received a call from his regional administrator, Ron Castleman, informing him that there had been a disaster involving the space shuttle. Castleman had few details to share, but he told Wells, “Be prepared to leave shortly.”

Half an hour later, he phoned Wells back again. “Start heading toward Barksdale Air Force Base. There will be more information to follow.”

President Bush had declared a state of emergency in Texas and Louisiana. He authorized FEMA to coordinate and direct all other federal agencies that might be responding to the accident. Castleman assigned Wells as FEMA’s leader on the scene.

During the six-hour drive southwest to Barksdale, Wells teleconferenced with Castleman, FEMA headquarters in Washington, NASA headquarters, and Tom Ridge, the head of the new Department of Homeland Security. Priorities for NASA and FEMA were clear. First and foremost, they were to ensure public safety. Recovery of the crew’s remains was the next priority, followed by supporting NASA’s accident investigation. [12] NASA, Space Shuttle Columbia Material Recovery, Report CB-QMS-024 (Houston, TX: NASA Johnson Space Center Flight Crew Operations Directorate, September, 2004, unpublished), 2.

Wells also received a call from Jack Colley at the Texas Department of Public Safety. Colley gave him the first detailed situational awareness of the conditions on the ground in Texas, because he had been in contact with the National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety people on the scene. Colley’s two biggest fears were that this was somehow linked to a terrorist attack, and that the hazardous materials on the shuttle could endanger public safety.

Astronauts Mark Kelly and “Ray J” Johnson arrived at Nacogdoches airport at midmorning in their coast guard helicopter. They learned that debris had been coming down all around the area, and that some had even hit the ground at the airport.

The astronauts walked to a hangar to examine some of the pieces that had been collected. Kelly instantly recognized a fuel tank from the shuttle’s maneuvering engines. Alarmed, he told the workers in the hangar not to go near the tank, as it might be contaminated by highly toxic propellants.

Kelly and Johnson boarded a police car to ride around town and assess the situation. Wreckage from the shuttle appeared to be strewn everywhere—even along the roadway. Kelly wondered: How could you even begin to get control of this situation?

The astronauts returned to the car after examining a piece of debris on the roadside. One of the police officers said, “We’re getting reports that some of the crew might have come down near Hemphill.” Kelly and Johnson knew that they needed to get there as quickly as possible. They returned to the airport and boarded their helicopter, directing the pilot to take them to Hemphill, sixty miles to the southeast.