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

The incident command team discussed an offer of a thousand additional volunteer searchers for the weekend. The consensus was that the Hemphill command team’s capacity was barely able to logistically support the feeding, transportation, and leadership span of control of the current number of searchers, let alone an additional influx of people equal in size to the town’s entire population. [30] Cohrs, “Notes,” 9.

The nonstop activity in the command center was taking its toll on Greg Cohrs. He likened the environment to being in a piranha tank, with people constantly grabbing him from every direction, sixteen hours a day. Despite the food being brought to the station by volunteers, Cohrs had no time to eat. He lost fifteen pounds in the week after Columbia disintegrated, and he was exhausted.

At eight-thirty that evening, as Cohrs was preparing instructions for the next day’s search, Terry Lane from the FBI told him he was needed at the Lufkin center immediately. Cohrs jokingly asked if he was under arrest. Lane said no, but the leaders in Lufkin critically needed to hear from him personally regarding search-and-recovery operations. Cohrs hesitated, but Lane insisted. They departed for Lufkin thirty minutes later.

Having been confined to Hemphill’s tiny operations center for a week, Cohrs was astounded at the huge scope and frenetic pace of the operations in Lufkin. He joked to Lane, “We could have been finished with the search by now if we had all these people!” At the command meeting, Cohrs was asked to give a briefing on his search operations. He laid out a taped-together map on the table and showed them the area already searched as well as plans for upcoming searches. He explained that although the teams were finding and identifying debris, they were not collecting any at the moment, because they were entirely focused on finding the bodies of the remaining two crew members.

A hush fell over the meeting. Someone said, “What do you mean, we’re still searching for crew members?”

Cohrs replied, “We’ve only recovered five. We’re still searching for two more.”

Because of the secrecy wrapped around the crew recovery operations, the people in the command center who were involved only with the debris collection efforts were astonished to hear that two crew members were still missing.

Cohrs was unsure what the leadership team thought about his search plans. He feared the leaders would reassign his resources to San Augustine County, even though all the crew-related finds had been in Sabine County.

But the meeting concluded with the direction to redeploy San Augustine’s resources to concentrate search efforts in Sabine County over the weekend. Cohrs would have a huge number of new searchers to coordinate the following morning. If there was one piece of good news, it was that the people coming from San Augustine already had several days of training and experience in the field.

Lane drove Cohrs home after the meeting. At about one in the morning, he collapsed into bed.

On Saturday, February 8, NASA’s teams at Barksdale, Lufkin, and Carswell Naval Air Station briefly stood down to attend memorial services for Columbia ’s crew. Meanwhile, a memorial service was held in Lufkin’s First Baptist Church. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe spoke of NASA’s gratitude to the citizens of Texas for their support in the recovery operations. Texas Governor Rick Perry also spoke, and astronaut Jeff Ashby delivered a tribute to his fallen comrades. [31] “In Honor of the Columbia Shuttle Astronauts,” Lufkin, TX, First Baptist Church, February 8, 2003.

In Hemphill, when Greg Cohrs and his colleague Paul Dufour drove to the VFW hall to deliver the morning briefing, they were shocked to see a line of state patrol cars stretching more than a quarter mile down the road. No parking was available within a ten-minute walk of the building. So many people were gathered outside that he had difficulty getting to the door. Cohrs found the inside even more crowded, “as if all of the people were stacked into the room standing up.” As he made his way through the crowd, Cohrs ran into his son Adam, who had taken the weekend off from college in Beaumont to join the search.

In a fog of disbelief, Cohrs delivered the operational part of the briefing while he was still trying to figure out how to assign so many new resources—1,500 today versus 650 yesterday—and get them out to the field with the very limited transportation available.

He deployed the new teams to cover areas along the centerline that had not been searched before. But the searches were frustratingly inefficient. It was nearly impossible to maintain a disciplined search line with teams of fifty to eighty people. In addition, many searchers were not physically up to the task, and team leaders had to take them out of the grid before the end of the day. As important as it was to locate Columbia ’s crew, it was not worth risking more lives to recover those who had already perished.

A searcher in one of the National Guard units suffered an injury. The unit became lost when their GPS device failed, and they called for assistance. Terry Lane and Cohrs located them from their previous GPS report. Cohrs learned that the troops had not been issued compasses. After a few calls from Cohrs and the DPS, the guardsmen had compasses the next morning as backup to their GPS devices.

After a week in the field, team leader Jamie Sowell was tired and grumpy. Three elderly volunteers were among his new team members this Saturday morning. Sowell was frustrated to have to continually rehash the basics of search protocol. Time was too valuable to spend half a day bringing new people up to speed. He issued terse instructions on how to conduct the search and then spread his team out in a line through the woods.

Team leaders probably walked three times the distance of the other searchers every day. They constantly walked back and forth behind the lines, issuing instructions to keep searchers evenly spaced and in a straight line so the area could be completely searched.

In “cold” areas, there were times when debris sightings were few and far between. Searchers wondered if they were overlooking things if too much time passed between sightings. When someone found a piece of debris, curiosity naturally got the better of many of the volunteers, and they wanted to see for themselves what the debris looked like. With fifty people spaced ten feet apart from one another through the dense undergrowth, chaos quickly ensued when people gathered to examine a newly found object. It could take an hour to get everyone back into position and resume the search.

After Sowell’s crew found its first object of the day, his three new elderly volunteers broke from their positions to examine it. They argued over whether the object was a piece of the shuttle, because it appeared to have rust on it. Sowell began to lose his temper. “Look, guys, we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists. You need to get back into line!” To his surprise, one of the men told him that, in fact, they were rocket scientists—retired Apollo-era NASA employees. Sowell was briefly speechless. Regaining his composure, he said, “That’s nice. But get back in line!”

After a week on-site in Hemphill, NASA’s workers from Kennedy continued to be overwhelmed by the local citizens’ acts of charity and kindness. NASA workers found that their money was no good in town—the grocery store refused to let them pay. In return, the NASA personnel freely offered mission pins, patches, and crew photos, which the townspeople eagerly received.

Wet conditions in the field soaked the searchers’ socks and boots, rendering the cold intolerable. There was so little time between searches that hanging socks up to dry was not enough. Hearing that, one of the senior loan officers from Shelby Savings Bank purchased for the searchers all the socks available in Hemphill’s stores, and also bought all that were available in the Walmart at Jasper.