Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  One day Riley found a “Lift-the-Dot” type of fastener on the ground. It made him wonder: Where did that come from? Was that from a harness? Was it off a uniform? Was it used to fasten something to a wall? On another day’s search, he found a piece of curved glass, “smoky” on one side, which appeared to have an inspection seal on it. Again, he wondered where on the shuttle it had come from and why it was lying here so peacefully in front of him. It was difficult to fathom that each little piece had been in space, had gone through the breakup of Columbia forty miles up, flown across Texas, and then fallen to Earth in his county. Even though his “old bones were dog tired” every evening, and he was happy to have a hot shower at the end of a grueling day, each morning he was eager to don his Carhartt overalls and get back out in the rain to help with the search.

  Mike Alexander, another local volunteer, felt the same way. Painful arthritis made him hesitant to search the first few days, and the going was tough. However, he found the experience so rewarding and compelling that he told his wife that he just could not stay home.

  The US Forest Service team leaders appreciated the local knowledge, determination, and tenacity of these older volunteers. Jamie Sowell described Riley as “tough as a boot” and “a godsend”—someone he could depend on to help the newcomers.

  In the fire hall, co-incident commander Billy Ted Smith felt that he was on borrowed time. As an employee of ExxonMobil in Beaumont, Texas, he had received permission to take off several days to work the incident command for the shuttle recovery. Now, he thought he needed to turn over the responsibility for the operation to someone else so that he could return to his day job. A congressman visiting the site told Smith that he was too valuable to the operation to leave. A few phone calls garnered Smith permission to stay in Hemphill as long as he was needed. He ended up being on duty in the command center for twenty-seven days.

  With almost no advance notice and little time to prepare, Greg Cohrs and Marcus Beard were asked to step in front of the cameras and brief the national media at five o’clock. Reporters asked Cohrs several times about crew remains, but NASA had instructed him not to discuss anything about the crew. Cohrs and the incident commanders knew that the bodies of two of the crew members had not yet been recovered, seemingly contradicting NASA’s press release that seven flag-draped caskets containing the remains of Columbia’s crew members were arriving at Dover that afternoon.25 The NASA release was essentially factual—they had recovered partial remains of all seven crew members—but the bodies of two of them had not been located. Cohrs suspected that the media felt things did not quite add up, because they were aware of the continuing activity around the command post and the county.

  After the news conference, four Native American fire crews arrived in town. Cohrs planned to deploy these additional eighty searchers the next day. Wildland fire crews like these, contracted by the US Forest Service, would become the backbone of the recovery effort within two weeks.

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  Thursday, February 6, was a miserable day in Sabine County. Temperatures ranged from 40°F to 44°F, with sleet and about an inch of rain. Swollen creeks, some chest deep, were difficult for searchers to cross. Sixty-four agencies were at work in the county, with about 850 people involved in search and support. Searchers received yellow rain slickers to wear over their heavier clothes. Briars and nearly impenetrable thickets shredded the thin material within minutes.

  Greg Cohrs was concerned about the safety of the searchers, the risk of hypothermia or exposure, and the dangers of crossing rain-swollen creeks. But he had to find the remaining crew. Time was running out. The longer the bodies remained in the field, the greater the likelihood of forensic evidence being lost.

  In the late morning, the incident command team decided to recall the teams led by the Forest Service. The searchers felt angry and betrayed to be pulled in from the field. The National Guard, better prepared for the conditions, continued searching.26

  Roger and Belinda Gay had been sleeping at the VFW hall every night since the shuttle accident. They rose at three o’clock every morning to begin cooking eggs for the searchers. Today, the Gays and their helpers cracked and cooked more than 2,500 eggs.

  Volunteers from the community continued to donate food. People brought in whatever they could. An elderly gentleman whose wife was bedridden prepared a plate of fried chicken and brought it to the VFW. When he saw the throngs of searchers at the hall, he said, “This ain’t gonna be enough to feed anybody.” Belinda Gay told him, “It’s the little things that make the big picture happen. Had you not brought that chicken, those three men over there might not have gotten to eat today.”

  One woman of modest means brought in a cooked chicken, and she apologized profusely that it was all she could spare. She appeared impoverished, so the searchers took up a donation and purchased groceries for her to ensure that she had enough to eat.

  Someone delivered a sheet cake decorated as an American flag with the names of the STS-107 crew. No one would serve it. Eventually it was covered with plastic wrap and put on display.

  Pat Smith, an employee at the Shelby Savings Bank, appealed to her manager to help feed the searchers. They purchased several cases of fried chicken from the grocery store. As she and her manager drove up to the VFW hall to deliver their donation, they were astounded at the line of cars ahead of them and “little old ladies getting out with their peas, their dumplings, their corn bread, and their cakes. They’d just deliver it and drive on out.” Smith broke into tears when she saw firsthand the outpouring of support in the community.

  Third grade teacher Sunny Whittington felt guilty about not being able to help out in some significant way after hearing her students tell about their parents’ volunteering. As she drove to work, she stopped at the grocery store and purchased supplies for making sandwiches. Her teaching partner saw her unloading her truck at the school and asked what she was up to. “We’re going to make sandwiches!” she said. “School isn’t just about reading and writing and math. It’s about life.” Her colleague immediately offered to have her class help, and then called her husband to purchase more food. The children in the two classes made more than five hundred sandwiches that day.

  While the searchers appreciated the kids’ offerings, what touched them most was that a child’s handwritten note of encouragement and support accompanied each sandwich. Many of the volunteers and National Guardsmen wrote letters back to the school to thank the kids. Even today, searchers weep when recalling how deeply moved they were by what the students of the elementary school did for them.

  Despite the community’s seemingly endless capacity for good works, it was quickly becoming apparent the VFW could not continue to rely solely on the generosity of the local populace. The perishable food being brought in overwhelmed the storage capacity of the VFW’s refrigerators and freezers. Health issues from unsafe food were a concern.

  Sheriff Maddox called his friend Jerry Powell at Tyson Foods to ask for a loaner refrigeration unit. Powell said, “It’s on its way. Do you need any food?” Maddox replied that they would gratefully accept anything Tyson could offer. Powell sent a freezer truck full of frozen chickens along with the refrigerators. A group from Gregg County brought steam tables to the VFW hall and began preparing hot food—a service they performed for the following week.27

  The VFW hall had three serving lines, feeding more than one thousand people three times per day. There was so much food and so many searchers on hand that the volunteers had to feed people in shifts.

  Hivie McCowan—the widow who had been afraid to look for debris in her pasture several days earlier—volunteered as a food server at the VFW hall. “To let them know what I was serving, I kept saying, ‘Sweet tea? Sweet tea?’ I’d said it so long that after a while, they just started calling me ‘Sweet Tea.’ It was awesome!”

  And much to the relief of the early morning food service volunteers, the McDonalds in Jasper announced they would start sending prepared breakfast meals.
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  Astronauts Jim Wetherbee, Jerry Ross, John Grunsfeld, and Scott Horowitz tried to refine the search area for the crew’s remains and the critical components inside the crew module. They were attempting to reconcile conflicting data, analyses, and speculation about how the crew module might have come apart and how winds aloft might have carried the remains and debris in various directions. It was confounding their attempt to narrow the search path.

  Ultimately, Wetherbee and Ross told their teams to rely on the “ground truth,” analyzing only the data for the items that had made it to the ground. A glove here, a helmet there—these were the physical evidence of how Columbia actually fell to earth. Their analyses, aided by geospatial staff at Stephen F. Austin State University, further narrowed the search path that day. They subsequently helped to target searches to precise areas where there was a high likelihood of locating remains of the crew.28

  That evening, Brent Jett met with Cohrs and informed him that NASA wanted to realign the search centerline from the original one that Cohrs had drawn using the satellite imagery and the location of crew remains. Grunsfeld’s analysis of GPS locations in the debris field enabled NASA to further narrow the search corridor for Columbia’s crew to an area one mile wide by twenty-five miles long. NASA thought the actual debris trajectory was four degrees different in azimuth from Cohrs’s original projected line. Cohrs narrowed and realigned the next day’s search area in Sabine County to correspond with NASA’s analysis.

  The remains of Columbia’s crew members were eventually found in Sabine County within the narrow search area defined by Jim Wetherbee and John Grunsfeld.

  As February 7 dawned, Texas had 430 state employees active in the recovery. There were eight hundred National Guard troops on search duty. Louisiana had more than 175 state employees on search duty.29

  Johnson Space Center encouraged its staff to volunteer to help in the search effort—but they would have to take personal leave to participate. Many JSC flight controllers, engineers, and other government and contractor personnel did take leave to help with the search, out of a sense of loyalty to their fallen friends and to America’s space program. Six days after the accident, several JSC employees were on hand in Hemphill’s VFW hall.

  Greg Cohrs had about 650 people to put in the field in Sabine County this cold, showery morning, including six teams led by Forest Service staff, 230 National Guardsmen, fifteen mounted searchers from the Department of Criminal Justice, the eighty people on the Native American fire crews, thirteen dispatch teams, and six canine search teams. As the morning progressed, cold rain lessened in intensity and sky conditions improved, allowing aerial searches to begin again.

  The incident command team discussed an offer of a thousand additional volunteer searchers for the weekend. The consensus was that the Hemphill command team’s capacity was barely able to logistically support the feeding, transportation, and leadership span of control of the current number of searchers, let alone an additional influx of people equal in size to the town’s entire population.30

  The nonstop activity in the command center was taking its toll on Greg Cohrs. He likened the environment to being in a piranha tank, with people constantly grabbing him from every direction, sixteen hours a day. Despite the food being brought to the station by volunteers, Cohrs had no time to eat. He lost fifteen pounds in the week after Columbia disintegrated, and he was exhausted.

  At eight-thirty that evening, as Cohrs was preparing instructions for the next day’s search, Terry Lane from the FBI told him he was needed at the Lufkin center immediately. Cohrs jokingly asked if he was under arrest. Lane said no, but the leaders in Lufkin critically needed to hear from him personally regarding search-and-recovery operations. Cohrs hesitated, but Lane insisted. They departed for Lufkin thirty minutes later.

  Having been confined to Hemphill’s tiny operations center for a week, Cohrs was astounded at the huge scope and frenetic pace of the operations in Lufkin. He joked to Lane, “We could have been finished with the search by now if we had all these people!” At the command meeting, Cohrs was asked to give a briefing on his search operations. He laid out a taped-together map on the table and showed them the area already searched as well as plans for upcoming searches. He explained that although the teams were finding and identifying debris, they were not collecting any at the moment, because they were entirely focused on finding the bodies of the remaining two crew members.

  A hush fell over the meeting. Someone said, “What do you mean, we’re still searching for crew members?”

  Cohrs replied, “We’ve only recovered five. We’re still searching for two more.”

  Because of the secrecy wrapped around the crew recovery operations, the people in the command center who were involved only with the debris collection efforts were astonished to hear that two crew members were still missing.

  Cohrs was unsure what the leadership team thought about his search plans. He feared the leaders would reassign his resources to San Augustine County, even though all the crew-related finds had been in Sabine County.

  But the meeting concluded with the direction to redeploy San Augustine’s resources to concentrate search efforts in Sabine County over the weekend. Cohrs would have a huge number of new searchers to coordinate the following morning. If there was one piece of good news, it was that the people coming from San Augustine already had several days of training and experience in the field.

  Lane drove Cohrs home after the meeting. At about one in the morning, he collapsed into bed.

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  On Saturday, February 8, NASA’s teams at Barksdale, Lufkin, and Carswell Naval Air Station briefly stood down to attend memorial services for Columbia’s crew. Meanwhile, a memorial service was held in Lufkin’s First Baptist Church. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe spoke of NASA’s gratitude to the citizens of Texas for their support in the recovery operations. Texas Governor Rick Perry also spoke, and astronaut Jeff Ashby delivered a tribute to his fallen comrades.31

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  In Hemphill, when Greg Cohrs and his colleague Paul Dufour drove to the VFW hall to deliver the morning briefing, they were shocked to see a line of state patrol cars stretching more than a quarter mile down the road. No parking was available within a ten-minute walk of the building. So many people were gathered outside that he had difficulty getting to the door. Cohrs found the inside even more crowded, “as if all of the people were stacked into the room standing up.” As he made his way through the crowd, Cohrs ran into his son Adam, who had taken the weekend off from college in Beaumont to join the search.

  In a fog of disbelief, Cohrs delivered the operational part of the briefing while he was still trying to figure out how to assign so many new resources—1,500 today versus 650 yesterday—and get them out to the field with the very limited transportation available.

  He deployed the new teams to cover areas along the centerline that had not been searched before. But the searches were frustratingly inefficient. It was nearly impossible to maintain a disciplined search line with teams of fifty to eighty people. In addition, many searchers were not physically up to the task, and team leaders had to take them out of the grid before the end of the day. As important as it was to locate Columbia’s crew, it was not worth risking more lives to recover those who had already perished.

  A searcher in one of the National Guard units suffered an injury. The unit became lost when their GPS device failed, and they called for assistance. Terry Lane and Cohrs located them from their previous GPS report. Cohrs learned that the troops had not been issued compasses. After a few calls from Cohrs and the DPS, the guardsmen had compasses the next morning as backup to their GPS devices.

  After a week in the field, team leader Jamie Sowell was tired and grumpy. Three elderly volunteers were among his new team members this Saturday morning. Sowell was frustrated to have to continually rehash the basics of search protocol. Time was too valuable to spend half a day bringing new people up to speed. He issued terse inst
ructions on how to conduct the search and then spread his team out in a line through the woods.

  Team leaders probably walked three times the distance of the other searchers every day. They constantly walked back and forth behind the lines, issuing instructions to keep searchers evenly spaced and in a straight line so the area could be completely searched.

  In “cold” areas, there were times when debris sightings were few and far between. Searchers wondered if they were overlooking things if too much time passed between sightings. When someone found a piece of debris, curiosity naturally got the better of many of the volunteers, and they wanted to see for themselves what the debris looked like. With fifty people spaced ten feet apart from one another through the dense undergrowth, chaos quickly ensued when people gathered to examine a newly found object. It could take an hour to get everyone back into position and resume the search.

  After Sowell’s crew found its first object of the day, his three new elderly volunteers broke from their positions to examine it. They argued over whether the object was a piece of the shuttle, because it appeared to have rust on it. Sowell began to lose his temper. “Look, guys, we’re not a bunch of rocket scientists. You need to get back into line!” To his surprise, one of the men told him that, in fact, they were rocket scientists—retired Apollo-era NASA employees. Sowell was briefly speechless. Regaining his composure, he said, “That’s nice. But get back in line!”

  After a week on-site in Hemphill, NASA’s workers from Kennedy continued to be overwhelmed by the local citizens’ acts of charity and kindness. NASA workers found that their money was no good in town—the grocery store refused to let them pay. In return, the NASA personnel freely offered mission pins, patches, and crew photos, which the townspeople eagerly received.

  Wet conditions in the field soaked the searchers’ socks and boots, rendering the cold intolerable. There was so little time between searches that hanging socks up to dry was not enough. Hearing that, one of the senior loan officers from Shelby Savings Bank purchased for the searchers all the socks available in Hemphill’s stores, and also bought all that were available in the Walmart at Jasper.