Bringing Columbia Home

by Michael D. Leinbach

  NASA liked the approach. On February 12, NASA and FEMA gave the Texas Forest Service the “Go” to contract for one hundred twenty-person fire crews, with their associated overhead and support personnel, and twenty-four helicopters from the US Forest Service. The US Forest Service agreed to have the helicopters begin air searches by February 14, with all ground crews searching in the field within two weeks.5 More than half of the Texas Forest Service’s employees had already been mobilized into leadership action for the Columbia search-and-recovery efforts.6

  KSC had no shortage of people eager to help out in the search for Columbia. In fact, the hardest part of staffing the operation from NASA’s perspective was turning down KSC personnel who wanted to help but who were not physically or emotionally up to the grueling conditions. “We didn’t want to run the risk of hurting more people,” said Dave King.

  Assuming the US Forest Service’s resources were in place by the last week of February, FEMA estimated that search operations of the entire debris field could be wrapped up by April 15. That date was important for several reasons. First, it was critical to try to beat the spring “green up,” after which new foliage would render many of the wild areas nearly impassable and make it more difficult to spot debris on the ground. Second, NASA was under pressure to complete the investigation as soon as possible. Finally, the operation was expensive—the search effort would cost FEMA (and the US taxpayers) roughly $1 million per day.7

  How could it possibly be worth spending so much money to recover wreckage from a destroyed spaceship?

  Public safety was the overarching concern. Federal and state governments wanted all potentially hazardous shuttle debris collected and removed as quickly as possible.

  Next, NASA and the CAIB needed to find physical evidence that proved conclusively how and why Columbia broke up. None of the thousands of pieces recovered so far appeared to be the smoking gun. Where had the breach in Columbia’s heatshield occurred that allowed hot plasma to penetrate the wing? Was there a hole in the wing’s leading edge? Had the landing wheel well somehow been compromised? Or had tiles on the wing’s underside burned through?

  Was the Columbia accident a fluke, or did it point to a fatal flaw with hardware or procedures that could doom future flights? Unless we could prove with certainty what caused the accident, the rest of the shuttle fleet would remain grounded—perhaps permanently.

  Without a shuttle fleet, the International Space Station could not be completed. Billions of dollars worth of space station modules were sitting in a processing facility at KSC, waiting to be launched. The United States would default on its commitments to its international partners, because the modules they had paid for and built could never get to the station without America’s space shuttle. The shuttle was a critical asset, and it was in the country’s interest to return the shuttle to flight.

  FEMA, EPA, NASA, and the US and Texas Forest Services geared up for two months of an all-out push. By chance, the transition to the new search approach coincided with an unrelated need to move the joint command operations out of the Lufkin Civic Center. Lufkin wanted its prime community space back again, as a convention was scheduled in the coming week. Over the Valentine’s Day weekend, the incident command team moved its operations to a bank building with vacant office space eight blocks south of the Civic Center.

  NASA also decided to consolidate its command structure. Having two command centers—one at Lufkin and one at Barksdale—contributed to confusion and occasional contradictory responses to questions from personnel in the field. By February 28, NASA made Lufkin its command headquarters for the recovery effort. Barksdale would only be a staging area for shipments to Kennedy. Jerry Ross and Dom Gorie took turns leading the debris recovery effort for NASA.

  Searching the designated Columbia debris corridor in Texas was now solely the responsibility of the interagency management teams directed by the Texas Forest Service. Volunteer search operations in Hemphill wound down, and the commanders there prepared to transition the searches to the professional teams. Many of the volunteers were disappointed that they could not continue to assist in the search.8

  However, volunteers still aided the searches in areas outside of the main debris corridor. For example, many of the townspeople of Maypearl, Texas, turned out for a three-day community search effort that involved “four-wheelers, horses, and lots of free pizza.”9 Much farther west, volunteers searched unsuccessfully for Columbia debris along the California coastline beaches over the weekend of March 1.10

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  The Texas Forest Service arranged for the incident management teams to set up camp at fairgrounds or rodeo arenas in towns along the shuttle’s ground track—Hemphill, Nacogdoches, Corsicana, and Palestine. These towns were close to the centerline of the debris field and were spaced roughly fifty miles apart. Each town’s camps could accommodate eight hundred to one thousand searchers. At any given time, five IMTs would be in Texas, and the IMTs and their fire crews would rotate out every two to three weeks. Twenty-one IMTs eventually participated in the search-and-recovery operations.11

  The IMTs and their fire crews entered and departed East Texas through a staging and coordination center at Longview. Longview oriented incoming search crews on the conditions they could expect on the ground in Texas. No motels were available, so searchers needed to bring tents and sleeping bags. Temperatures could range from the mid-twenties at night to the mid-seventies in the daytime. Heavy rains could occur at any time. Searches would be in terrain that varied from open pastures to swamps to extremely dense vegetation. Ticks and chiggers were common, although the cool temperatures were likely to slow down any snakes and alligators in the area. Finally, searchers might encounter hazardous materials or human remains.12

  The Southwest Texas Debriefing Team, a part of the Critical Incident Stress Management network, spoke with fire crews when they first arrived in Longview. Searchers received information on how to monitor themselves and their colleagues for signs of physical and emotional stress. The briefing team also reminded searchers how grateful NASA and the nation were for their efforts.13

  Crews came from almost every state in the United States. Much to the surprise of the NASA staff, most of the crews from the Midwest and Western United States consisted of Native American firefighters, representing nearly every Native American Tribe and Nation in those states. In many areas or reservations, it can be hard for young adults to find jobs. Working on a fire crew both provides good temporary income for able-bodied persons and also helps protect tribal lands during fire season. The presence of people representing so many different tribes provided a multitude of lessons in cultural diversity.

  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

  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.

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  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

  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 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 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 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

  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.

  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 sea
rch 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

  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.”