COLUMBIA LOST
Shuttle's flight path becomes horrible field of debris
By Lianne Hart and Ken Ellingwood
Los Angeles Times
NACOGDOCHES, Texas — On clear mornings, it wasn't unusual for residents of central Texas to catch glimpses of the space shuttles as they arced toward touchdown in Florida.
Associated Press
That flight path became a vast field of debris yesterday as a terrible rain of burned metal— once the space shuttle Columbia — fell over horse pastures and front yards, onto bank parking lots and the sidewalks of small towns across Texas and parts of Louisiana. Ordinary folks expecting an ordinary day instead found themselves navigating a landscape specked with the jagged emblems of loss.
Workers from NASA, the FBI and Texas Department of Public Safety said a prayer yesterday over human remains found in a field southwest of Hemphill, Texas, before removing them.
At Pioneer Park in Nacogdoches, one of the hardest hit spots, Katrina Self broke down crying after tripping across what appeared to be an electrical box lying beneath an oak tree. The piece of metal, said Self, a 25-year-old student, made immediate the deaths of the seven Columbia astronauts.
"They probably touched that," she said, her eyes filling with tears. "Seeing this in person, you know that they were real people. Seven people. It took me back to when I was a child and the Challenger happened. It's happened again. I can't believe it."
Folks say not much happens around this town of 31,000, about 130 miles northeast of Houston. And so it was with a sense of gravity that residents drove around town, toting children and armed with Polaroids and video cameras, to chronicle a moment of American history, if a tragic one.
There were no injuries reported on the ground from the falling debris, but authorities along a stretch more than 100 miles long took up guard around blackened remnants and warned residents not to touch debris out of fear that the pieces might be contaminated by toxins used to fuel the shuttle.
In Hemphill, near the Louisiana state line, hospital employee Mike Gibbs reported finding what appeared to be a charred torso, thigh bone and skull on a rural road near what was believed to be other debris. Billy Smith, an emergency coordinator for three East Texas counties, confirmed the find.
"I wouldn't want anybody seeing what I saw," Gibbs said. "It was pretty gruesome."
Around 8 a.m., Nacogdoches residents reported first hearing a prolonged boom — some said it lasted five minutes, others two — that puzzled them because of its force. Debra Johnson, a Nacogdoches middle-school teacher's aide, turned to her father: "Did we just have a bomb? Did we just derail?"
The answer became clear as residents encountered a scene more fitting for a science-fiction movie. Along the town's quiet streets lay chunks of the shuttle, ranging in size from that of a pebble to 8 feet long. There were straight metal strips and pieces bent in a curve. There were scraps that resembled tar paper and others bearing the marks of rivets.
Associated Press
One chunk pierced the roof of a dentist's office.
Astronaut Mark Kelly picks up a piece of debris from space shuttle Columbia in Nacogdoches. Debris was scattered from east Texas well into Louisiana.
Authorities cordoned off wreckage with yellow police tape and assigned guards. Officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warned that debris might be contaminated. Around Dallas, highway signs urged anyone who found debris to call police. On Smith Street in Nacogdoches, eight National Guard troops in camouflage uniforms kept watch over a scrap of charred metal, about 1 1/2 feet long, sitting outside a homeowner's fenced yard.
In nearby rural Dialville, Harvey J. Hanson, a 54-year-old retired police officer, was watching for the passing shuttle through binoculars when he saw "a ball of fire coming at me."
Four or five balls of fire fell from the first, Hanson said, and were accompanied by a sound "like bacon frying in a skillet ... I knew something was wrong, because parts were falling off it. Looked like a mass of meteors coming in. That just didn't add up."
The Environmental Protection Agency readied for a cleanup as military aircraft flew over a 2,000-square-mile debris field extending well into Louisiana and possibly beyond. NASA officials hope to recover every scrap in an effort to determine what went wrong. Officials said they were investigating more than 1,000 fragments across Nacogdoches County.
At the sheriff's office in rural Cherokee County in east Texas, deputies tracked the latest reported debris sighting by jabbing blue pins into a wall map. By evening, there were dozens. Officials from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and NASA were on hand. A 2-by-4-foot segment of the shuttle's outer shell fell into a front yard, barely missing a house. A piece of wreckage recovered in another area of the county filled a truck flatbed.
By yesterday afternoon, pieces described as chunks of the shuttle had begun showing up on eBay, the popular Internet auction site, prompting outrage at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A top law enforcement officer in Texas said the FBI was investigating. In Nacogdoches, the debris invited a vigil-like solemnity.
At the parking lot of the Commercial Bank of Texas downtown, Sylvia Haley joined others near where a 3-foot piece of metal lay. She had driven 25 miles with a friend to view the wreckage.
"We wanted to be close, to look at it," Haley said. "It kind of makes you feel like you're putting your arms around them."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
