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

The woods held other hazards for those who did not know what to watch out for. On one of the few clear days during his deployment, Arriëns and his crew were working in an area where timber cutting or a beetle kill of trees had occurred. These kinds of forest openings often contained dead snags, root-sprung trees, or trees weakened by insects or disease. Workers in such areas had to pay close attention to “widow makers” that might break or be blown over in the wind or rain. Arriëns and two of his colleagues sat down on a large fallen tree to eat their lunch. They suddenly heard a loud crack! and a twenty-inch diameter tree fell at their feet. One foot farther to the side and it would have killed them instantly.

Arriëns only fell behind once during a search in a dense stand of young pine trees. He left his spot to examine what appeared to be parts of a TV system. However, he neglected to make a note of his position before he walked off, and he became disoriented. “The pine needles were right in your face,” he said. “You could talk to someone one tree over from you, and you could not tell where it was coming from, because the undergrowth was so very dense.” The team started yelling to him to help him find his way back. When he finally found them again, several of the men had placed their gloves on their shovel handles in such a way that the handles extended the middle fingers of their gloves. It was a sarcastic but good-natured reminder to follow safe woodland practices.

Arriëns brought his harmonica with him and would occasionally play when things got tedious on days where little was to be found in the woods. He thought that the others might not like it. However, it lightened the mood, and they often encouraged him to play.

Arriëns unexpectedly confronted his emotions on one day’s search. He had been one of the last seven people to see Columbia ’s crew on January 16, when he helped strap them into their seats in the orbiter before launch. Now, at a spot near a magnolia tree with a stream running beside it, he saw a cross and flowers marking where remains of one of Columbia ’s crew members had come to Earth. “I just couldn’t go any further,” he said. “I stayed there for about forty minutes. That’s where I put them to rest. And then I went on and did my job.”

One of the Sabine County search teams suffered a scare on Sunday, March 2. KSC’s Pat Adkins was walking with a search team in the Six Mile and Big Sandy Coves area near Toledo Bend Reservoir. Adkins heard over his portable radio a shouted order from the crew boss for everyone to freeze in place immediately. One of the searchers thought he had seen something buried in the ground. He knelt at the spot and poked at it with his walking stick. He and the people around him suddenly became nauseous, headachy, and short of breath. Everyone immediately feared that he had encountered a shuttle component contaminated with hazardous chemicals.

While the overcome men were being attended to, Adkins gathered the rest of the crew and gave them a safety reminder. “Nothing out here in these woods is as important as your safety. We’re gonna find what we need to find, whether you take a chance or not. So don’t take chances.”

The EPA closed off the search area for a day so hazmat teams could clear it. They determined the searchers had been affected by naturally occurring swamp gas—methane with hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide—from rotting material in a stump hole. When the searcher poked his stick into the mat of vegetation over the hole, it released the trapped gas. [20] Cohrs, “Notes,” 17.

Stump holes were familiar hazards to the local residents who had stepped in them many times during their years of walking in the woods. For people who were not used to the heavy rain and muddy conditions in the pine forests, their first encounters with the hidden traps could be scary. Jamie Sowell was with one Sioux strike team in the woods one rainy day when he heard screaming up ahead. One searcher had stepped into a stump hole with both feet, fallen in, and was now trapped up to his waist. His colleagues stood in a wide circle well back from him, believing he had been caught in a swamp of quicksand. Sowell said, “My guy walked over to him, grabbed him by the hand, and helped him out. Then he explained to everyone that it was a stump hole.”

Weather extremes were difficult to deal with. The persistent cold rain and sleet of February began to alternate with hot days in the spring. Searchers from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska had difficulty coping with the stifling heat and humidity of Texas. Even though coordinators like Greg Cohrs monitored the forecasts and radar data as best they could, sometimes personnel were caught out in high winds or torrential rains. On one occasion, searchers were fortunate to be missed by a tornado, but were painfully pelted by hailstones.

The briars and thorns were as much a problem to the professional wildland fire crews as they were to the volunteers in the early days of the searches. Florida firefighter Jeremy Willoughby said, “I’ve been in the woods a lot, but I’ve never seen anything that thick. You had to use your body weight in some places to lie down in the bushes and make yourself a path. One guy next to me went underneath a branch and got a thorn right in his eye. It was horrible.”

Pat Smith said that searchers covered with scratches and cuts would come into her bank in Hemphill. “I’d say, ‘Oh, you’re walking!’ They would reply, ‘Yeah, and those wait-a-minute bushes are killing us.’ They called them that because while they were walking, someone would run into one and yell, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute!’”

Through it all, NASA was deeply impressed at the keen eyes of the fire crews during the search. “They did not miss the slightest bit,” Arriëns said of the Native Americans with whom he searched on his first day. “They’d come to me with pieces under a quarter of an inch.” Debbie Awtonomow said, “They were phenomenal. One guy saw a puddle in the woods, and he knew from experience it didn’t look right. They found a six-foot beam buried in the mud under that puddle.”

The Forest Service initially staged its contracted helicopters at the airports in Lufkin and Palestine. [21] Toward the end of the search period, the Forest Service set up a temporary helicopter base at Ennis, between Dallas and Corsicana. More than thirty helicopters were in the air at any one time over the search area, sweeping a three-mile path on each side of the ground search corridor. The Texas Forest Service flew fixed-wing aircraft over the area to coordinate air traffic. Astronauts Scott Kelly, John Herrington, Tim Kopra, Terry Virts, and Butch Wilmore took turns as NASA’s coordinators for the air search. [22] Jerry Ross email to Jonathan Ward.

The helicopter contractors had their own fuel trucks, which helped to maximize the time the choppers were deployed every day. Pilots could arrange to have the fuel truck meet them at a pasture near the day’s search area, rather than having to fly back to the airport to refuel. The spotters had time to grab a quick sandwich, and then it was time to get back into the air.

The aerial search crews usually consisted of a pilot and a helicopter manager from the Texas Forest Service in the front seats, with another Texas Forest Service or US Forest Service worker and one or two KSC engineers or technicians in the backseat to spot debris. If a clearing was nearby, the chopper could land to inspect or retrieve an item that looked particularly noteworthy. Otherwise, the crew noted the GPS location and sent a ground team to retrieve the piece of debris later. Helicopter spotters were also sometimes able to see items in areas that were inaccessible to ground searchers. [23] Interview with Boo Walker.