Recovery teams hunt for debris

2003-02-03 08:37

Douglas, Texas - On horseback and in four-wheel-drives, hundreds of law officers and volunteers tromped through piney woods, over pastures and through swamps, looking for pieces of Columbia that could explain what brought the shuttle down.

Pieces as small as a coin and as big as a pickup were being secured on Sunday and will eventually be analysed at Barksdale Air Force Base next door in Louisiana.

Experts will try to reassemble sections of the shuttle to figure out how it broke apart and why. Before the shuttle went up, every piece was numbered and carefully catalogued.

Nasa space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore called the salvage operation "the first step of piecing together the puzzle" of what sent Columbia spiralling from the skies over Texas on Saturday, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Nasa said remains of some of the astronauts have been recovered.

Through thick woods that are home to wild hogs and bobcats, 75 volunteers and law officers carried out their hunt near Hemphill on the Louisiana line. About 12 metres into the forest, a searcher shouted, "Hold!" when he spotted a chunk of metal dangling from a limb.

A volunteer marked it with a red flag.

Not too far away, in the community of Douglass, a 46-centimetre piece of what appeared to be duct piping put a dent in the roof of a school. Debris was also found near the pitcher's mound of the baseball field and the track. Little orange flags marked every piece.

"We're just fortunate no one was injured by it," Principal Jay Tullos said as a technician carrying a remote Global Positioning System satellite backpack plotted some two dozen pieces of shuttle debris that rained down on the 8-hectare campus.

The GPS mapping is a key part of the investigation. By pinpointing the location of each piece, scientists can figure out the sequence in which the shuttle broke up.

Douglass, a farming and ranching community about 240 kilometres northeast of Houston, is just one of hundreds of evidence sites in a mammoth, multistate debris field dotted with creeks, lakes and reservoirs. - Sapa-AP

- SAPA