Spring Bloom to Smother Shuttle Hunt

The most imminent threat to the investigation into the Columbia disaster is not fuzzy satellite photographs, lost data streams or tangled bureaucracy.

It’s the onset of spring.

This time of year in East Texas, where thousands of pieces of space shuttle wreckage landed Feb. 1 after falling 200,000 feet, winter yields to a swampy, humid spring. The region undergoes a majestic metamorphosis known locally as “greenout.”

Jasmine vines crawl across the forest floor and wind their way up mailboxes, chimneys and the antennas of abandoned cars. Dogwoods flower, and even poison ivy looks pretty from a distance. Amateur photographers arrive in droves to take pictures of wildflowers, and hikers flock to four nearby national forests. Any other year, said Gay Ippolito, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman and an area resident since 1961, “it’s a time of renewal.”

Not this year.

This year, greenout means search-and-recovery teams already struggling through dense forests and heavy briar patches will soon be rendered impotent as the region is blanketed with lush foliage and vegetation.

Officials said Thursday that, in response, they have begun establishing an army of forestry workers who have brought a frenzied pace to the operation.

NASA officials said more than 3,500 people are now walking shoulder to shoulder a stretch that is 240 miles by 10 miles, searching for wreckage that could be critical to determining why the shuttle broke apart, killing its seven crew members.

An additional 1,500, mostly Forest Service workers who normally spend their time battling wildfires, are expected by the end of next week.

All told, the operation will soon be staffed by twice the number of searchers that had been in the area previously. Firefighters from 20 states, including California, are expected to take part.

Officials are also bringing in 35 helicopters to search for debris from the air, 16 more than had been operating previously.

They are in a race against time, and they seem to be losing.

Members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the independent panel appointed by NASA to determine the cause of the accident, said this week that despite an already widespread search, just 11% of the wreckage has been recovered.

Finding some of the larger pieces has been relatively easy -- one search team found a 7-foot-long piece Wednesday of what appears to be the shuttle cockpit, complete with gauges, an official said Thursday.

But illustrating how critical the smaller pieces will be, one investigator said this week that he hopes search teams recover tiny pieces of the shuttle covered with droplets of melted aluminum. That, he said, could be the only way that NASA confirms its belief that the space shuttle’s aluminum shell was penetrated by superheated gas known as plasma seconds before it broke apart.

Time pressure is a given at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where top NASA administrators and military brass have established the command post of their high-tech probe. It’s less familiar up here, 160 miles to the north, past the one-room church in Seven Oaks, population 131, past Mud Creek, where folks give you directions by telling you to turn left at the bait shop.

Pretty soon, Jeff Abt fears, all those big numbers -- all those helicopters and all those searchers -- won’t amount to much.

Thursday evening, Abt, 50, looked out the enormous window that lines the living room of his home in Harmony, a rural community about 10 miles west of Nacogdoches. A steady rain pelted his four acres.

“See that house over there?” Abt asked, pointing through the woods. “You won’t be able to see it in a month.”

Tall evergreens dominate the woods behind his home. Green buds are already poking out meekly from the tips of twigs on the forest floor. Soon, said Abt, a landscape gardener, nature photographer and horticulturist, thorny vines called smilax will begin to take over, along with Japanese honeysuckle and blackberries, known locally as dewberries. Evergreens will get fatter and hardwood trees will regain their leaves, making aerial searches impossible.

Already, search teams have returned to command posts scratched and bloodied by briars and shrubs. With the onset of spring, Abt said, “It will be impenetrable.”

“If I wanted to torture someone, I’d send them through the woods of East Texas in March,” he said. “Debris will be impossible to find. They’ll just have to give up until next fall.”

That is a painful realization in nearby Lufkin, where federal officials have moved into three floors of a largely vacant office building to establish a search-and-recovery command post. Many of the officials scurrying about the site grew up in the area. While many think they were dealt a tough hand when their amiable communities became a debris field, they are also determined to find as much of the wreckage as possible.

“I saw a little saying the other day, and I’m going to try not to cry when I say it,” Ippolito said.

“It said: ‘Their mission became our mission.’ That’s how most of us feel, whether we’re sitting in a building, at a computer, reading maps or searching on the ground. That’s why there is such a sense of urgency here. The forest is about to change, and this stuff is going to be hidden. It’s right around the corner.”

Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss figures he has two weeks of visibility left. Maximum greenout is expected by the end of March.

“That’s our window,” Kerss said. “This effort has to intensify. We have to help answer the question of what caused this tragedy to happen.”

NASA has also asked ranchers and farmers -- this is the top blueberry-producing region of Texas -- to walk their property before they till their soil for spring planting.

“We just don’t want them to plow anything under,” said NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley in Houston. “We’ve asked them to be diligent.”