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

And now I would also be returning home—to receive Columbia ’s wreckage, and try to determine the cause of the accident from it.

With the news from Hemphill that the final Columbia astronaut had been recovered on February 11, the search effort now lacked the urgency of finding the crew. Meanwhile, the rest of the country was on war footing, preparing to invade Iraq. Rumors abounded that Homeland Security would raise the alert level in the coming days or hours. The National Guard was going to be recalled from the search effort immediately, taking with them their hundreds of searchers and their Blackhawk helicopters. The remaining makeshift search teams had done their job remarkably well despite the cold, rain, and rough conditions.

But critical pieces of the shuttle still remained missing, without which NASA might never know for certain what caused the Columbia accident.

On the evening of February 11, the leadership team in Lufkin discussed their options for continuing the search for Columbia ’s widely scattered debris within the ten-mile-wide, two-hundred-fifty-mile-long debris path. NASA’s Dave King worried it was too inefficient and dangerous to continue to put volunteers and law enforcement officers in harm’s way searching a huge area in an undertaking that was likely to take several months.

The experiences of the previous eleven days exposed logistical weaknesses in the search effort. It would be unreasonable to expect the local incident managers to continue to run things for the next several months. Many of them had day jobs, unrelated to their work in incident management, to which they needed to return. It was impossible to find and train the huge number of local volunteers and other searchers needed for a sustained effort. Finally, the small towns of East Texas could not be expected to continue to endure the hardship of supporting hundreds or thousands of searchers for months.

Astronauts Dom Gorie and Jerry Ross were still figuring how to wrap their arms around the huge scope of the debris recovery effort. As they sifted through the problem, it became clear that they needed to organize operations in much the same way that Jim Wetherbee had organized the search for the crew—with officers appointed to the lead ground, water, and air search components. The US Navy had just agreed to take on water search operations, but who could provide the resources for the air and ground operations?

From the very outset of the crisis, local leaders who had large-scale incident management experience saw that this was going to be a long-term operation, based on the size of the debris field, the terrain, and the thousands of pieces of the shuttle that made it to the ground. Several of them, including Olen Bean, Marcus Beard, and Mark Stanford, suggested to FEMA that US Forest Service incident management teams (IMTs) could run the search efficiently utilizing wildland fire crews.

Their suggestions did not gain an immediate foothold, at least not until late in the second week of February. [1] Interviews with Olen Bean, Greg Cohrs, and Mark Stanford. Cohrs added in an email to Jonathan Ward, “The Hemphill Management Team was filling individual resource orders for incident overhead personnel beginning late in the first week, toward the weekend. Also, during the second week, the Southern Area (US Forest Service, Region 8) Type 1 Incident Management ‘Blue’ Team had assumed incident management of the Nacogdoches Camp activities. I’m guessing that this occurred by Wednesday, Day 12, because Marcus [Beard] and I drove over to Nacogdoches to share our experiences with the Blue Team personnel in the event that it might be helpful to them. I’m not sure when the other camps (Palestine and Corsicana) had IMTs assume command, except the Great Basin Type 1 IMT in-briefed with us in Hemphill on Sunday, February 16, and assumed command of the Hemphill Camp operations on Monday, February 17.” It seemed illogical to NASA and FEMA to bring in wildland firefighting crews for a search-and-recovery operation. Perhaps it was interagency unfamiliarity with what IMTs and fire crews could actually do and the types of incidents in which they had already performed admirably.

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group, with membership from nine federal agencies, used IMTs to manage responses to large-scale fires and other major natural and man-made disasters. But those IMTs were not just professional firefighters. Their support structure included leaders and members from federal, state, and local agencies who dealt with an amazing array of “all-hazard” incidents. In addition to containing large-scale wildfires, they provided assistance in such diverse situations as search and rescue following the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, containing the Exotic Newcastle Disease (avian flu) outbreak in Nevada in 2003, and disaster recovery in areas devastated by hurricanes and floods.

When it became clear that the National Guard was being pulled from the Columbia search operation in the ramp-up to the Iraq War, Mark Stanford of the Texas Forest Service and Marc Rounsaville of the US Forest Service once again proposed that NASA and FEMA run the debris searches with IMTs managing US Forest Service fire crews. [2] Keller, USDA Forest Service Role , 19. This time, the circumstances were such that Stanford and Rounsaville’s proposal looked very attractive. Dave King, Scott Wells, and Dave Whittle began to consider the idea seriously.

Stanford and Rounsaville pointed out the US Forest Service IMTs deployed as completely self-contained units and could be on-site within a matter of days. They brought their own tents, equipment, clothing, food, portable toilets, shower facilities, transportation, cooks, accountants, command organization—everything they needed to set up operations wherever their presence was required. IMTs normally utilized elite Type 1 “hotshot” crews and Type 2 fire crews to respond to complex incidents. [3] A Type 1 “hotshot” crew is an elite, highly trained fire crew whose members always work together as a unit. A Type 2 crew is a regular fire crew made up of personnel who are available at a given time for an assignment. Each crew was staffed by twenty able-bodied, disciplined, and motivated men and women who were already trained in the practice of grid searching in remote areas. Hundreds of such crews existed across the country, with thousands of potential searchers. They would only need orientation in what to look for and how to handle what they found in the field.

Wells, Gorie, and Ross were intrigued. They asked Stanford how many people the US Forest Service could bring in. He said that the wildland fire service could bring in one thousand firefighters within a few days. Gorie and Ross immediately asked, “How about a thousand more?” Stanford said it could be done, but it might take another few days. When Gorie and Ross pushed for yet another thousand firefighters, Stanford pointed out that since February was not fire season, many personnel in the seasonal fire crews were currently off duty. They would have to be mobilized, but it would only take a few days. The good news was that they were unlikely to be pulled away from the search to fight wildland fires elsewhere at this time of year.

Gorie was impressed. He said, “It was miraculous. I had no idea anything like that could ever be generated just for this effort.”

Then came the question as to how to organize the search to maximize the probability of finding debris of a certain size, while keeping the resources and time required at a reasonable level. NASA’s database indicated about 75 percent of the ten thousand pieces of material found so far was within two miles of the centerline of the debris path. Gorie asked that the Texas Forest Service run calculations for finding an object six inches square, which would be typical for a piece of tile on the shuttle’s underside. Their analysis showed that a search line of people spaced five to ten feet apart—basically at just about fingertip distance—could find about 75 percent of such pieces on the ground if they searched two miles on either side of the centerline. To increase the likelihood of finding the occasional outliers, helicopters could survey the area on five miles on either side of the centerline. This ten-mile-wide path encompassed 95 percent of the debris already in the database. [4] NASA, Report CB-QMS-024 , 9. Finally, water teams would search within two miles of the centerline in Toledo Bend Reservoir.