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Our emergency plans assumed that a landing problem would happen within sight of the runway, where a failed landing attempt would be immediately obvious to everyone. Today, there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. We had no idea what to do.
Each one of the tens of thousands of pieces of debris produced its own sonic boom as it passed overhead.
Recovered shuttle debris was already appearing for sale on eBay. Jeff Millslagle asked the Houston FBI office to shut down those listings immediately. Shuttle material was government property, and unauthorized possession was a federal crime.
Stanford knew that he would be immediately shot down, laughed at, or ignored if he announced that “the Texas Forest Service is here to bring order to the situation!” His experience showed that the best way to get a team to embrace you in a disaster situation was to make yourself as helpful as possible. “Figure out who’s in charge by observing the scene. Then go up to that person and say, ‘What three things are biting you on the ass?’ And then you make it your goal to fix those three things. Then you’re part of the team.”
Interestingly, after the moratorium was announced for Columbia debris, NASA received a few calls asking if the moratorium also applied to material from the Challenger accident seventeen years earlier. NASA said yes—and several pieces of Challenger’s wreckage were then turned in.25
One of the first incident commanders the Forest Service brought in was a man named George Custer, who administered the Nacogdoches camp. Understandably, many of the Native Americans wanted to have their picture taken with him.
facts: The Columbia recovery was the largest ground search effort in American history; and it was also one with no internal strife, bickering, or inter-agency squabbles.
