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

By February 23, 4,560 wildland fire personnel were on-site in Texas, which included 169 twenty-person crews and 1,272 overhead support positions. [14] Keller, USDA Forest Service Role , 46.

Jerry Ross recalled seeing the fairground area at Nacogdoches before the searchers arrived, when it was just open field and concrete slabs. He returned two days later to find “… hundreds of people established there with all their equipment, their tents, their cooking facilities, their showers, their bathrooms—everything. Pow! It was there! You make a phone call and things start happening immediately. It was pretty amazing.”

Greg Cohrs said that with the arrival of the fire crews, the Hemphill Camp at the rodeo arena became the largest “city” in Sabine County.

Search coordination evolved into a sophisticated operation two weeks into the recovery of Columbia ’s debris. The Texas Forest Service produced a search plan using two-mile search grids along the centerline from just west of Fort Worth in Texas to Fort Polk, Louisiana. The grids were assigned alphanumeric codes, and search teams throughout the debris corridor used the same coordinated system for the remainder of the debris recovery operation. To be certain they missed nothing, much of the already-searched part of the corridor—including the entire San Augustine and Sabine County area—was covered again, as if it had never been searched. [15] Greg Cohrs email to Jonathan Ward.

Barksdale, Lufkin, and the reconstruction hangar at Kennedy exchanged detailed information on what was being retrieved and where it was coming from. As more debris and data came in, it became easier for us to identify the areas in the field where particular items of interest might be found. For example, most of the crew module items were being found in San Augustine and Sabine Counties. If we identified in the reconstruction hangar a circuit board from a component of one of Columbia ’s avionics boxes, teams searching for a sensitive computer that had been near that component on board Columbia could be targeted the next day to search in the area where the board was found.

NASA’s “ground boss” in Lufkin coordinated with the rest of the leaders to review what the previous day’s items of interest were and which areas to focus on next. [16] Jerry Ross email to Jonathan Ward. The NASA astronauts who shared the “ground boss” role were Jim Halsell, Alan Poindexter, Bob Behnken, and Mike Foreman. Astronauts rotated during the recovery period to keep from getting worn out. The Texas Forest Service printed maps using recent satellite photos of the targeted search areas and distributed them to the appropriate command centers every evening.

Every morning, the IMT commanders at each of the search centers reviewed the maps and instructions with their strike team leaders, who typically supervised five twenty-person crews, [17] Greg Cohrs email to Jonathan Ward. and assigned each team’s search area for the day. Then the crews would disperse to their assigned areas and begin searching.

The influx of technical support from KSC continued as the next phase of operations ramped up. These were primarily United Space Alliance technicians, although some NASA employees also participated in the search teams. Regardless of whether this person was a civil servant or a contractor, search crews referred to their assigned KSC representative as their “NASA.”

One NASA and one EPA contractor accompanied each fire crew on a day’s search. More than two hundred of our workers from KSC, and about the same number of EPA contractors, were on the ground across the Texas debris field every day.

Because Texas was still under a federal disaster declaration, the search teams technically had the authority to search private property without a landowner’s permission. An FBI representative accompanied each search team that crossed private property in case official authority needed to be exercised. Most of the time, landowners were willing to let the searchers onto their property. On occasion, an armed farmer or rancher refused access. Rather than try to press the issue, the search team leaders usually backed off and asked the landowner to check the property himself. [18] Interview with Gerry Schumann. As one person pointed out, “Texans will give you the shirt off their back. But if you try to take it from them, they’ll fight you for it.”

Livestock ranchers, as well as poultry and dairy operators, were understandably concerned about large groups of people traversing their land and frightening their animals. Chickens might not lay eggs for several days if they were disturbed. Poultry could also suffer heart failure, suffocate, or be exposed to viruses. Spooked cows and horses could run into barbed wire fences and injure themselves. NASA and FEMA legal teams in Lufkin eventually processed 153 claims for damages resulting from the search operations. [19] Shafer and LeConey. “Legal Issues,” 79–82. NASA reviewed 153 property damage claims and provided compensation totaling $89,407. While many claims were legitimate, many were spurious. A typical example of the latter was one man who claimed that burning shuttle debris had set fire to his fishing pier, where in fact his barbeque grill had clearly caused the damage. The largest legal claim against NASA was by Spacehab, seeking $87.7 million in damages for loss of the research double module. Spacehab withdrew the claim in February 2007. “Spacehab Drops Columbia Lawsuit Against NASA; Says Efforts Better Spent Elsewhere,” Aero News Network , February 22, 2007.

Territorial bulls were also problematic. NASA’s Gerry Schumann and Debbie Awtonomow, who was managing the Hemphill collection site, went with a team one day in March to retrieve debris reported by one rancher, which turned out to be battery packs from experiments in the Spacehab module in Columbia ’s payload bay. When Schumann and Awtonomow tried to return to their vehicle, a bull blocked their way. It seemed to be infatuated with Awtonomow and would not leave her alone. Some of the team distracted the bull long enough for her to get back in the vehicle. Then the bull stood in front of the car and put its horns against the grille, refusing to let the team leave. The rancher had to lead the bull away.

René Arriëns, a member of our shuttle’s closeout crew, now found himself in a very different world from working in the White Room at the launchpad. He spent his nights in a trailer at a fish camp on Toledo Bend. By day, he walked with one of the two search teams under his direction. “I thought I was fairly prepared for anything they needed,” he said, “but it wasn’t anything like I thought it was going to be.” At times the terrain was swampy, requiring the search team to spend the day walking through water halfway up their shins. Arriëns counted fourteen different types of thorny bushes, all of which tore up his clothing so badly that he had to buy a new shirt or pants every day or two.

It rained all but three days during the time that Arriëns was in Sabine County. Deep mud seemed to be everywhere, and workers could not avoid tracking it wherever they walked. People traveled in groups so that someone could help push cars out of the muck if necessary. Mud would splatter up into the engine compartment of a car, and if allowed to dry, it could become as hard as concrete, ruining the vehicle. Felix Holmes from the US Forest Service occasionally had to use his bulldozer’s winch to dislodge search vehicles stuck in ditches and creek crossings.

On sunny days, snakes seemed to be basking everywhere. People often came close to stepping on them, causing searchers to jump and run. Arriëns encountered the biggest coral snake he had ever seen. He even saw snakes up inside bushes.