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

Nathan Ener and Tim “Peewee” Mitchell, residents of Bayou Bend Road west of Hemphill, spotted broken treetops in the forest canopy near Ener’s house. [6] Pete Churlon, “Space Shuttle Columbia Tragedy Photo Gallery,” Beaumont Enterprise (Beaumont, TX), January 28, 2011, www.beaumontenterprise.com/photos/article/photo-548675 . Mitchell saw what he thought to be a small garbage dump in the forest floor below. They examined the site more closely. Lying in a shallow crater on the forest floor below was Columbia ’s nose cap and some of its supporting structure (which some local citizens referred to as the “nose cone”). The dark gray reinforced carbon-carbon dome was cracked from colliding with the trees at high speed. Ener called in his find, but his description was vague, and the people taking the call did not immediately understand its importance. [7] Starr, Finding Heroes , 69–72.

It is understandable why the call might have been overlooked. By the end of the day on Monday—only two and one half days after the accident—there were tens of thousands of reports of debris on the ground in thirty-three counties in Texas. About twelve thousand pieces of debris had already been collected.

The lack of communications infrastructure was one of the most frustrating bottlenecks early in the accident investigation, especially when trying to talk to people in the field. Cell phone service was practically nonexistent. Calls to Hemphill had to be routed through the fire station’s front desk, which was overwhelmed with the calls coming in from searchers in the field and from local residents who were still finding material on their property. Calling back from the field to Lufkin was also challenging. Gerry Schumann resorted to making his calls on the pay phone at a Hemphill grocery store.

Although NASA and FEMA had provided satellite phones to some staff, they were difficult to use. Callers needed to be on high, unobstructed ground to get a clear shot at the satellite—impossible in Sabine County’s dense forests. Even in more wide-open places like Nacogdoches or Palestine, a satellite phone user had to stand out in the middle of a field or on top of a hill to make a call. The phones’ batteries ran down quickly.

Our temporary work-around was a network of runners. Each morning’s status meeting in Lufkin concluded with written instructions for each of the recovery sites. Then runners would drive the written messages to the leaders at each of the debris collection centers. If there was any news to go back to Lufkin, the runners could bring that information back by car.

Our teams used the runner system for the rest of the first week of the debris recovery operation. The process seems laughably quaint or inefficient now, especially for a high-tech organization such as NASA. However, it was the only solution at the time for exchanging detailed information in remote, rural locations where landlines, cell phones, satellite phones, and high-speed Internet were not widely available.

Meanwhile, cleanup of debris around schools, hospitals, and other public places continued. FEMA worked with the county judges in each of the affected counties to determine priorities for clearing debris. The county judges and FEMA separately reported back to Governor Perry about the status of the process. Good progress was being made by the end of the day, with about half of the schools reported free from Columbia debris.

KSC quality control inspector Pat Adkins drove from Shreveport to Lufkin to get his assignment for the debris recovery operations. Because of his familiarity with Columbia ’s crew module, he deployed to the San Augustine and Hemphill areas, where items from that section of the shuttle were being found. On the drive through the countryside toward Hemphill, Adkins noticed places where the road and shoulders were dusted with something that looked like fine snow. It turned out to be a powder composed of small chunks of tile and silica from the shuttle’s heatshield. [8] Pat Adkins email to Jonathan Ward.

Adkins arrived in the early evening at the San Augustine command center, which was essentially an old house that had been converted to a community meeting hall. He recognized astronaut Chris Ferguson, who was sitting at a table and cataloging some recovered items into a spreadsheet on his laptop. Ferguson pointed to the closet and told Adkins that it contained plastic bags filled with items that had not been examined yet. Adkins looked inside and immediately smelled oxidizer from Columbia ’s propulsion system. He propped open the door and a window to let the room air out.

Adkins donned latex gloves and began going through the material, separating out the items that might have been contaminated with toxic propellants. Everything was wet and muddy. In the bottom of the first bag, he saw a wristwatch with a fogged-over blue face. A few minutes later, he found a music CD with Hebrew writing on it. These startling objects were a grim reminder of what had occurred—a wake-up call for the emotional challenges he would be facing in the coming days and weeks. He took the crew’s personal items out of the closet, washed them off, bagged them, and gave them to Ferguson. [9] Pat Adkins email to Jonathan Ward. Jerry Ross said that he had advocated for having all crew personal effects sent directly to the Astronaut Office in Houston. However, instructions were that everything recovered would be processed through the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy first, and then crew items would be sent to Houston.

Thanks to an all-out effort by the EPA, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, local resources, and NASA, all of the school grounds along the debris path in Texas were reported clear of shuttle debris by late evening on February 3. Schools opened and students returned to their classes Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, more resources were showing up to recover and process shuttle debris. By February 4, the EPA had thirty-eight debris recovery teams on the ground in Texas, with an additional eighty teams expected by the end of the week. One hundred members of the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Teams were on the ground. [10] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find and Secure Activities for Columbia Emergency [11:00 a.m. Release],” news release HQ-03-034, February 4, 2003. The C-141 cargo plane scheduled to bring another wave of our NASA technicians to Barksdale from Kennedy was unable to make the flight Monday night because of mechanical problems, but a replacement aircraft was due Tuesday morning.

Although we were making some headway, the scope of the debris problem continued to grow. Half of Louisiana’s sites had been cleared of debris, [11] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find and Secure Activities for Columbia Emergency [4:00 p.m. Release],” news release HQ-03-035, February 4, 2003. but the overall land area that needed to be searched thoroughly continued to expand. Thirty-eight Texas counties were now reporting debris on the ground, with sightings of possible debris in California, Arizona, and Nevada. NASA and the EPA agreed to investigate those sightings. [12] FEMA news release HQ-03-034. FEMA itself had no authority under the disaster declaration to enter those states unless shuttle debris was actually confirmed there. [13] Shafer and LeConey, “Legal Issues,” 61.

A US Coast Guard strike team went out onto Toledo Bend Reservoir on this cold, rainy morning. The twenty-four-foot boat with side-scan sonar and divers would supplement the dive teams already on-site searching for debris. [14] FEMA news release HQ-03-035.