Remembering Columbia Disaster, 10 Years Later
Ten years ago on February 1, at a few minutes before 8, a sonic boom shook East Texas, followed by a series of rumbles. It was a cloudless, spring-like Saturday morning. I was walking out my door in Nacogdoches, headed to the newspaper office. I had heard on NPR that the shuttle Columbia. I looked up into the sky and saw the contrail splitting apart and thought, ‘‘Guess the shuttle just passed over.’’ I’ve seen the shuttle pass over before, and it’s a lovely sight, a quick flash of orange streaking across the sky from west to east. I figured I had missed seeing the shuttle by just seconds and shrugged. Maybe next time.
I should have realized that the shuttle doesn’t create a sonic boom at 200,000 feet.
Minutes later, pieces of the shuttle began raining down over Nacogdoches and much of Deep East Texas. I rushed to work and began frantically calling my staff. It was quickly clear that our small crew would be covering the biggest story of their careers. Within a few hours, our town filled with satellite trucks and journalists, National Guardsmen, sightseers, and hundreds of volunteer recovery workers. That scene was repeated in other towns throughout the Piney Woods — Lufkin, San Augustine and Hemphill in particular. Columbia’s crew of five men and two women perished in the explosion, a fact never far from the minds of those searching for shuttle debris. They were also searching for the remains of Columbia’s crew as well.
By the end of the next day, more than 800 recovery workers were scouring Nacogdoches County, while over a thousand were doing the same in Sabine and San Augustine counties. By midweek, 350 DPS troopers also arrived to serve as custodians for the evidence collected by the recovery crews. An estimated 300 media personnel had arrived by the weekend. A few dozen camped out in our small newspaper office. As I helped direct our coverage in the newsroom, I watched as then-County Judge Sue Kennedy and Mayor Roy Blake were interviewed on CNN. It was surreal, seeing folks I ate lunch with at Rotary every week answering questions on national television.
When a small town, or in this case several small towns, become the focus of national attention, it can bring out the best or worst in people. In the case of the Columbia disaster, for the most part it brought out the best. The response by the local leaders who put together the initial search-and-recovery efforts was quick, well-organized and drew praise — especially from NASA. Hundreds of people volunteered their time; restaurants donated meals to feed volunteers; businesses provided gloves and ponchos as the weather quickly turned foul.
There were a few knotheads, of course, but they were generally out-of-towners. Somebody try to sell a piece of the shuttle on eBay. The bidding rose to $31,000 before the online auction pulled it. Three people eventually were arrested for hiding pieces of the debris. But for the most part, people did everything they could to help.
A few weeks later, I walked into a pasture where recovery workers had searched for pieces of the shuttle. There were hundreds of blue flags, similar to the type used to mark utility lines, scattered about the five-acre field, to mark where pieces had been found. That scene was repeated along a long sad swath of Deep East Texas. The search went on for weeks, with volunteers eventually supplanted by professional crews staffed primarily by firefighters from various federal forest services and other agencies. More than 10,000 professionals from 42 states participated in the search over the course of nearly two months. They left their mark on our communities. A decade later, small memorials have been established in the various towns that hosted recovery efforts.
It is hard to believe 10 years have passed, especially to those of us who heard that blast and participated in the aftermath in some fashion — the recovery effort or covering it, in my case.
For us, the memory is still fresh.
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