At 9:12 a.m., Flight Director LeRoy Cain turned from his console to the back of the room, where he received word of a Dallas TV station broadcasting live images of multiple contrails high overhead, on Columbia’s flightpath. Thousands of pieces of debris were already hitting the ground, falling into ponds and backyards, on highways and car windshields, in a track of terrible rain ten miles wide and three hundred miles long, stretching from East Texas into Louisiana.
