Now three days into the recovery period, the Hemphill command center was running at full throttle. The US Forest Service personnel and local law enforcement officers used their training in the incident command system to create clear lines of authority and ensure that important issues were being addressed. The leadership team built upon each member’s training and expertise. Those who had never been through a major crisis quickly came up to speed.
At the same time, some of the command team leaders were ready to pass the responsibility for managing the recovery on to better-resourced organizations. Rumors circulated that the Department of Defense would take over the search operations.
When DOD representatives arrived in Hemphill on the third day, the command team greeted them and expressed their relief at being able to turn over the reins to the military. Much to their surprise, they learned that the officers were there only to inspect the operation. Everything appeared to be working well, so the military had no reason to take charge.
Inquiries about NASA, FEMA, or the US Forest Service assuming control were similarly dismissed. None of the forty-six federal, state, and local agencies on the scene saw any need to step in and take over an operation that was obviously working well.8
The Hemphill team was a victim of its own success at this point of the search.
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Jim Wetherbee and his crew recovery leadership team in Lufkin established a regular operational routine. Reports from the field came in by phone or runner several times a day. Using supplemental information from databases and maps as they were updated, leaders in Lufkin had a good feel for the situation on the ground.
Every evening, Wetherbee’s team planned their priorities for the next day’s search and where to target the search teams based on the information available. Then they turned the plan into actionable tasks. Senior search leaders were briefed at night and the field leaders the next morning before executing the search plan. They called back with the results at the end of the day, starting the cycle over again. A feedback loop from field personnel to Wetherbee’s team served as a management check. Are you getting the support you need? What’s working and what isn’t?
Despite all the organizational expertise being employed, Wetherbee said it felt like he had been making decisions every fifteen seconds for twenty-one hours straight for each of the first three days. He was getting about three hours of sleep each night—and it was not restful sleep. There was no time to let his emotions surface when he was on duty. But in his room late at night, he was alone with his thoughts—which constantly turned to Columbia’s crew and what had happened to them.
The intensity of the experience was already taking its toll on some people. Mark Kelly had been through the traumatic experience of recovering the remains of several of his colleagues, three of whom were his classmates in Astronaut Group 16. Kelly decided he had performed his duty. It was time to return home to be with his family and let someone else take over. Astronaut Nancy Currie was on hand the next day in Hemphill for crew recoveries.9
Wetherbee consulted with the FBI on how to help the astronaut searchers deal with the trauma of finding the remains of their friends. At the FBI’s recommendation, he instituted a three-day limit for astronauts working in the field on crew recovery. He forbade his ops managers to participate in search operations, as they were already under enough stress. He also made it mandatory that astronauts returning from the field to Houston speak with NASA’s resident psychologists.
Wetherbee developed a briefing to prepare arriving astronauts for the psychological and emotional agony of finding remains of their colleagues in the field. The primary responsibility of each astronaut was to recover the remains of Columbia’s crew with dignity, honor, and reverence. It was also imperative that the remains be taken to the temporary morgue as quickly as possible so that forensic evidence was not lost. Astronaut Dom Gorie would escort the remains to Barksdale.
Wetherbee instructed the astronauts to be guided by an “Eight, Eight, Eight Rule” in recoveries: “Eight days from now, eight months from now, and eight years from now, we must be able to live with the consequences of the decisions that we will make in the field. Every decision must be based on our highest judgment using our greatest professionalism and human values.”10 He was determined that things be handled with appropriate dignity and respect for Columbia’s crew. He knew the astronauts would do this without fail.
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Hemphill’s handful of small restaurants could accommodate only a limited number of people. As the staging area for the search teams in the morning, and the place where they returned after a day in the woods, Hemphill’s VFW hall was about the only place searchers could go for a meal. And they came in droves.
Since so many people needed to be fed at the VFW hall, Belinda Gay realized that she was needed there more urgently than out searching in the field. She had extensive food service management experience from running her own catering business and “Fat Fred’s” in town with her husband Roger. The incident command center officially deputized her on February 4 to run the food unit under Mark Allen’s logistics team.11
People were already bringing in food and offering to help serve it at the hall, but there were overlaps and gaps. Belinda organized the volunteers, made hundreds of calls over the next several days, and informed the local radio station about the kinds of food needed each day.
Tuesday morning’s good news was that all of the debris in or near the schools throughout East Texas had been cleared, and all schools could open. The bad news was that the search teams had been using school buses to get to and from the search sites, and now the school kids needed the buses. The Hemphill command center staff called the school districts in the neighboring communities to borrow additional buses. After taking the children to school, the buses were pressed into service to take search teams out to the field, returning to pick them up after kids went home for the day.
Hundreds of searchers had arrived in Hemphill over the past several days, and many were completely unprepared for the conditions. Personnel from Texas driver license offices were sent to help with the search, but they were not told what to expect. Many of these people had never been in the woods before. Some arrived without even a change of clothes. Texas state troopers were told to walk the woods in their regular duty uniforms, which were more suited to criminal investigations and highway patrol than to wildland operations. “Plantation” forests—cleared of older trees a few years before—were now young pine stands or dense brush thickets with briars that tore clothing to shreds. Sheriff Maddox remarked that some people had so many cuts and scratches that they looked like they had been through a meat grinder.
Ground search groups braved Tuesday’s cold and rain to search the area from Farm Road 2971 south of Hemphill to US 96 near Bronson.12 Floridians from Kennedy Space Center were not accustomed to the cold. Safety manager Gerry Schumann told his wife that it was like “hell on earth,” between the cold, sleet, rain, and the briars. Before the week was out, thorns destroyed the three pairs of jeans he had brought with him. He passed the word back to KSC that people needed to be better prepared for what they would be facing.
Some of the searchers cut their way through the undergrowth with machetes. After a National Guardsman accidentally severed the end of his finger, machetes were forbidden on search teams. Experienced woodsmen preferred using “walking sticks.” These large wooden poles could be used for support in slippery terrain, and they could push briar patches to the ground so that people could walk over or around them.
Diarrhea took its toll on dozens of people on the search teams. Days of sharing food and makeshift sanitary facilities contributed to its spread. Muscle cramps, dehydration, and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm some searchers.
The local volunteer firemen were on average much older than many of the people arriving from outside the area. However, they knew the deep woods intimately, and they were much better prepared for the conditions. Growing up in the area taught them m
any tricks for dealing with the undergrowth. Marsha Cooper wrapped one of her duty shirts in duct tape to help it stand up to the punishment.
Forestry technician Jamie Sowell from the US Forest Service led a team consisting of several other Forest Service personnel, a NASA representative, and as many as fifty volunteers from the local communities. He appreciated the dedication of the searchers, but he remarked that maintaining a straight search line with so many inexperienced people was often like herding cats.
Sabine County’s volunteer searchers performed admirably in maintaining their search lines. They resisted the temptation to extend out the ends of their lines, which might have caused them to miss something in their assigned areas. When one team found crew remains only forty feet outside the area searched the day before, the searchers were naturally impatient to cover more ground. But Greg Cohrs and the team leaders reminded them that it was imperative that they maintain a disciplined, methodical search pattern.13
Sowell and his fellow team leaders actively monitored their teams to identify volunteers who might not be up to the task physically or emotionally. The leaders occasionally suggested that some individuals might be better able to help out in some way other than walking the woods. He ensured that people knew that there was no shame in admitting they were not suited to woodland grid searching.
One out-of-towner, dressed in a suit and driving a Mercedes, drove up to the VFW hall and offered his services. He changed into work clothes and gladly helped sweep floors, clean bathrooms, and take out the trash.
Townspeople were still adjusting to the worldwide attention their quiet community was receiving. Residents had a hard time believing that so many astronauts were in their small town. To ease the tension, the astronauts tried their best to be just another part of the family. When they were not involved in the recovery efforts, they went out of their way to talk with schoolchildren and the volunteers.
But the astronauts naturally attracted attention from the media. It was impossible for them to travel from the command center to the VFW hall for a meal without having microphones shoved in their faces. Kennedy’s Pat Adkins, who was working in the Hemphill debris collection center, devised an order and delivery service from the VFW hall to enable the astronauts to eat in peace in the command center.
Housing everyone was becoming a logistical nightmare. Between people participating in a fishing tournament already underway on the nearby Toledo Bend Reservoir and all the searchers pouring into the area, no motel rooms were available within an hour’s drive of town. Even the town’s wastewater treatment facility struggled to keep up with triple the usual town population. Hundreds of National Guard troops were bivouacked in the Hemphill high school gymnasium, trying as best they could to make themselves comfortable and sleep on wall-to-wall cots.
Gerry Schumann was one of the few NASA personnel who was able to find a motel room in Sabine County. However, he slept in his car several nights during the first two weeks of the recovery period rather than make a late-night drive back to Hemphill from Lufkin.
Once again, county citizens came to the rescue. Owners of lakefront vacation houses in the area phoned the VFW hall to offer their properties for searchers’ use. They refused to take any payment, saying that it was the least they could do to help with the recovery. Other people offered searchers free room and board in their homes and to do their laundry.
Simple acts of kindness and words of encouragement comforted the NASA workers who were still grieving over their fallen comrades and the loss of Columbia, and who felt so far from home. Local resident Pat Oden wrote to a friend, “I was making a video of one of the news conferences and started talking to a young NASA man. I asked if I could video him and he said to me, ‘I am not anybody important.’ I replied, ‘To us you are very important.’ As I was taking his photo, I asked him his name and was he from NASA Houston. He replied, ‘No, ma’am, I am from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.’ With that remark, I quit taking photos and walked over to him and hugged him and told him I knew how hard this must be on him. He started crying, as I did. Very emotional. Makes me feel good that I retired to this small community.”14
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The first of many memorial services for the Columbia crew was held at Johnson Space Center at noon on February 4. It was a private ceremony for family members, friends of the crew, invited guests, and NASA employees and contractors. President and Mrs. Bush attended, as did Sean O’Keefe.15 At the ceremony, the president remarked that although NASA was being tested at this time, “America’s space program will go on.”16
In the skies above Russia, about an hour before the ceremony started, an unmanned Progress spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, bringing one ton of food and supplies to the crewmen—two Americans and one Russian. They could now survive at least until July without a space shuttle resupply mission. That was critical, because no one knew when a space shuttle might visit the ISS again.17
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Admiral Gehman and other members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board toured the three areas in the debris field and the collection area in the hangar at Nacogdoches airport. Gehman insisted the board see the debris in the field, to make the accident more personal to his investigation team and prevent it from becoming “an abstract event.” He said that the board had two main responsibilities. The first was to future astronauts, who needed to feel that everything possible has been done to make it safe for them to fly. The second responsibility was to the three astronauts aboard the ISS, who needed the shuttle to fly again as soon as possible.18
Jan Amen from the Texas Forest Service was pressed into service as a photographer for NASA during Gehman’s tour. Many of the photographs she took that day and over the next several months became part of the official record of the recovery operations. As a resident of a small town in rural Texas, she never dreamed she would be exposed to an event at the center of the world’s attention. She wrote an email that evening describing her first day working with NASA as “one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”19
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Jim Wetherbee called upon Dr. Jim Bagian, a former astronaut who had helped with the Challenger crew recovery, for consultation on crew recovery procedures. Among Wetherbee’s concerns was keeping any news about the status and condition of crew remains out of the press. Bagian helped him by developing a two-letter random code array to match the recovered remains to the appropriate crew member. Wetherbee was the only person in Lufkin with the full key to that code. This code enabled discussions about operations to be conducted over nonsecure channels without revealing sensitive information about which astronauts had been recovered and where.20
By February 4, it appeared that at least some portion of each Columbia crew member’s remains had been recovered. Dr. Philip Stepaniak and his medical team in the temporary morgue at Barksdale received, studied, and prepared the remains of Columbia’s astronauts that had been gathered so far.
The medical team and the recovery leaders in Lufkin debated about the appropriate time to transfer the crew’s remains to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Dover Air Force Base. On one hand, consideration for the grieving family members argued in favor of waiting to move all seven transfer cases at one time. On the other hand, it was imperative to get the remains recovered so far to Dover as quickly as possible, so more thorough forensic analyses could be performed to determine the causes of death. And until analyses of dental records and DNA could be completed, it was unclear just how much of each crew member’s remains had been recovered.
Wetherbee and Dr. Stepaniak jointly decided to send all seven of the caskets together on a flight to Dover the next day. They made the decision to ease the suffering of the families, the NASA family, and the public.21
At the end of the day’s operations, the search team leaders debriefed with some of the command team members in Lufkin. They provided feedback on how search techniques were working and whether an area was “cold”—without any significant mat
erial being found. Armed with this feedback and the GPS positions of the material and remains being recovered, the command team planned the next day’s searches.
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On Wednesday, February 5, at the eight o’clock morning phone call, FEMA’s Scott Wells reported that the Texas Army National Guard, coast guard dive teams, and six FBI canine teams were engaged in the search efforts. They were concentrating on a “hot spot”—a ten-mile by two-mile area—near Bronson and Hemphill. Wells noted that all federal agencies on the scene were at peak manning. Now the teams just had to “do the work.”
The search teams continued to grow. Now five days after the accident, there were eight hundred National Guard troops on duty in the search corridor, most of them working on crew remains search and recovery. The Department of Public Safety had 353 personnel in the field, and there were 140 US Forest Service workers on site. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had twenty-three teams deployed, and EPA had 370 people deployed. Sixty EPA teams had collected more than 1,100 bags of debris.22 The Texas Forest Service had 140 employees scattered throughout East Texas and on duty at Stephen F. Austin State University to provide support to the recovery.23 Louisiana had 174 searchers in the field.24
In Sabine County, the same search groups who had worked the previous day now combed the area stretching from south of Hemphill to US 96 near Bronson.
Hemphill’s Dwight Riley was participating as a volunteer searcher. He was becoming obsessed with the search in a very personal way, curious about the shuttle and its astronauts and how everything had come to rest in his county. Every find was seductive, something that made him empathize with the crew and the shuttle.
Bringing Columbia Home Page 12