Our Forest Service crew of 20 people is boarding our plane for Texas in Boise at the mobilization center at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). There are 120 of us in a single line 200 yards long. We are all carrying our gear bags and we are walking the 200 yards from the parking lot at the fire center to the plane on the runway where we load our own gear into the cargo holds of the chartered plane and board the plane, being sure to pick up a boxed lunch off the cart before we get on. This is our transport to Longview, Texas where we will be given further instructions as to where we will be working for the next 14 day of our assignment to help NASA search for and recover parts from the space shuttle Columbia. When we get there we will be among 3,000 others searching for parts from the space shuttle.

The reason we are going is because the Forest Service's Incident Command System is the perfect organizational structure to facilitate such a large scale operation as the search for the space shuttle Columbia's widely scattered parts. The Incident Command System (ICS) is designed to help mobilize and support large groups of workers in remote and primitive situations. It is what the Forest Service uses to help support the thousands of firefighters who put out the large wildfires in the western United States every summer wildfire season. Everything is accounted for to support the workers. A place to sleep, food, showers, toilets and even a way to do your laundry. Things like transportation to and from the incident and ground transport while there are all taken care of.

Three hours later we are preparing to land in Longview, Texas. We are all looking out the windows to see what Texas looks like. We figured it would be like a desert but what we see outside is far from that. It is cloudy and looks like it might rain. There are lots of trees and it looks fairly thick in some spots. Not what we figured it would be like. But hey, we are here to see something new and help however we can. That is what's great about going on assignments for the Forest service. You never know what to expect but you know you will be helping the cause somehow.

Once we are on the ground we quickly unload the plane and wait to be told where we are going. In this baggage claim area nobody loses any luggage because we are the ones who loaded the plane and unloaded it. The airplane quickly departs back to Boise to bring another load of crews from Boise out here to Texas. We are told we are going to Palestine, Texas where they are just setting up a new camp for the search. We march out to the parking lot where there are what looks like 80 vans. All of them look alike and they are white and brand new. We are assigned two vans for our crew and then we wait for the other crews to be assigned theirs so we can convoy down to where we will be working. They give us a map with basic instructions on how to get to Palestine.

Once on the road our convoy of fifteen white vans looks a little conspicuous. We begin to see what Texas is going to look like for us on our ride south to Palestine. What we see at once is that Texas has an amazing road system. We are out in a rural section of the state and the roads are in great shape and the speed limit is 75 miles per hour on a double lane road.. We also see a lot of trash beside the road. The shoulders of the road are full of it. What we see of the terrain is rolling hills that have some open fields but are mainly forested with pine trees and deciduous trees. Occasionally we pass by an area that looks like a swamp. We are on the east side of Texas so this looks similar to what I thought Louisiana might look like. The towns we pass through are small.

After an hour or so we arrive at what is to be our base camp just outside Palestine. It is an expo center for showing cows and livestock.. We are the first crews to arrive here. We check in and set up our camp for the night. The tent area is in the back of the camp in a large field. The dinner caterer and showers are already set up in the field and are ready for service. As the evening progresses the field begins to fill up with crews. By morning the field is full of 20 crews.

It is a gray morning and our crew leader has an 8 o'clock meeting to find out what we are going to be doing. We get up at a fairly leisurely pace and go to breakfast. I meet some people from Oregon who are on another crew. All the crews here are Federal firefighting crews. It is early season so not all the temporary employees are on so there are people from various departments in the Forest Service who are helping fill out the crews. It is a great bunch. By the time my breakfast is over it has started to rain. And rain it does. It is pouring! I decide to wait in the dining tent to see if it stops but it just won't let up. Finally I get hold of a garbage bag to cover myself with so I can make a dash to my tent at the back of the field. By now there is mud and standing water everywhere so getting back to our crew area takes some doing. People have started to dig diversion ditches around their tents and there is rushing water in some of them. This is a disaster! We can't stay out in conditions like this for two weeks. Finally the word comes that we are evacuating to the buildings in the expo center so we pack up all our stuff and head for cover. The expo center has a three walled building in it that is where the animals are shown and that is where we are all corralled till they figure out what they are going to do with us. It is not warm and we are wet and miserable. The rain continues to come down and by now it has probably rained three inches in the past four hours.

Finally they figure out what they are going to do with us. There is a Christian retreat just south of town that has cabins where we will stay. We shuttle our gear over there in two trips because we have no gear hauling trucks. We get set up in our new temporary home just in time to get back in the vans for dinner. The camp is out on the edge of the woods and is centered around a pond. The pond is getting a little bigger the more the rain comes down. Each cabin has two rooms with six bunk beds in each room. We bring in our wet soggy gear to try and dry it out. The humid weather and cramped quarters make it hard to dry anything. We end up staying here for two nights while it continues to rain without letting up.

Our final home is inside a six acre warehouse in town that is set up as the base camp for the project. We are assigned a place to set up our tents and we make the best of it. The nice thing about being here is that we are under cover and everything we need from base camp is here. The not so nice thing about being in the warehouse is that there are 700 of us living inside it in close quarters.

Once in the warehouse we receive technical training on what we are looking for and what to expect for when we finally get to go out and look for parts. On our first day out we receive more training to get us in the process of searching. We are searching in a farmer's field and we actually start to find pieces. After that we go out in our group of 700 people and line out across the woods and start gridding. Sounds pretty easy on paper but try to coordinate getting a line of 700 people moving the same direction at the same time when part of the line is walking through fields another part through thick brush and another might be crossing a fence line. It just doesn't work. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it didn't work. We would get out there and wait twenty minutes for the rest of the line to get formed up and then we would finally get to move. Then one part of the line would hit an obstacle and we would have to slow down or stop or move to one direction in the line for them. It was enough to drive you crazy. But you just had to go with the flow and laugh it off or it would drive you crazy. Especially thinking about how much money was being wasted trying to coordinate it this way. After a few days of gridding as a single unit of 700 people they finally figured it out and we got to go out in smaller groups. That made for a lot easier going.

The most common things to find from the space shuttle are pieces of tile from the protective coating of the shuttle. The whole shuttle was covered with tile so there is a lot of it out there and a lot of it has shattered into tiny pieces which we found everywhere. We found pieces of metal too. The metal was usually in small shards or chunks which are sometimes recognizable. Everything is so lightweight. The metal is amazingly light and one nearly complete piece of tile that we found was floating in a puddle in a swamp. Each crew is assigned a NASA employee to help identify what is found and two Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) people along to help identify any health hazards. The EPA people also do all the cataloguing of the pieces and they end up carrying all the pieces of what we find back to the trucks. They are good people who are fun to have around. They are different from us in that they are not used to walking through the woods. Each of them is typically working on a 30 day detail to the project. The NASA people are dedicated to the project from start to finish. It is their project and they are in it for the long haul if they can afford to break away from other duties back at the space centers. Occasionally a large chunk would be found by another crew and it was interesting to go see what it was. I got lucky and found the biggest piece for our crew which was a piece of the leading edge of the left wing that was 14 inches by 20 inches. It was not a piece of carbon-carbon that is on the main part of the leading edge of the wing but a piece of "spun carbon" that is on the forward part of the leading edge closest to the body of the shuttle. It was pretty exciting to walk up to that in the middle of the forest and have it just lying there.

The terrain we were going through was densely vegetated at times and sometimes it was difficult to find a way through without having to crawl on the ground where you might find that it was slightly less thick. There were thorns on vines that were woven throughout the bushes and it was nasty working your way through them. Everybody was carrying a stick to beat down the brush so that it would not scratch you into a bloody mess. I resisted carrying a stick but found that sometimes it was the only way to get through without subjecting yourself to all the thorns. When we were lucky we would be walking through an open forest or even an open field. But where there were open fields there were barbed-wire fences to negotiate.

Every week or so there would be a talk in camp given by a NASA astronaut. That was always interesting. There would be NASA patches, pins and stickers given out. The talks were great to give us a perspective on how important our job was. The exploration of space is an important enterprise and we were helping it get back on its feet by helping in the recovery operation.

Overall we had an interesting time of it all. It would have been great time if it hadn't rained 5 inches of rain on us while we were there or if there hadn't been nasty thorns in all the brush. Not many people are able to say they were involved in such an important piece of history as the recovery of a crashed NASA space shuttle. We were lucky to be privileged enough to go on this adventure.

 

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