Through The Briars & Brambles:

On a NASA Mission in East Texas

Most people would think two weeks of 12-hour days spent crawling through eight ft. high briars, and nights spent freezing in unheated tents sounds pretty grim, but two Rochester residents, Keefer Irwin and Walt Wells, are glad they got the chance to do it.

Trained as forest fire fighters through the U.S. Forest Service, the two friends are used to being in the woods under difficult conditions; a quality that made them valuable members of a crew of 20 highly trained volunteers from New England (10 from Vt., seven from N.H., and three from Maine; including 17 men and three women) who spent a challenging and rewarding two weeks as part of the massive search effort to recover debris from NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia, which exploded Feb. 1.

Leaving home Feb. 19, the New England crew flew to Houston, and was sent to Nacogdoches, where an expo center had been converted into a base camp for the searchers. Between 800-1,000 volunteer workers from 26 states were present at that camp, which was one of three such camps, making a total of 3,000 searchers working in that area of eastern Texas.

After a meeting with the whole camp, the "new kids on the block" had a briefing from NASA officials that included a warning about explosives and other toxic materials they might encounter.

Keefer was impressed by astronaut Don Gorie’s poignant comment: "NASA is one big family and now you’re part of our family." 

The search area, a strip 10 miles wide and 240 miles long, was divided into a grid pattern. The area was full of briars ("think rose bushes eight feet high and multiply them by 1,000" said Keefer) that would grab at and tangle in the searcher’s clothing. Clothed in their fire gear, with helmet liners, brush chaps, water resistant boots and rain slickers provided by NASA, they worked in 12-hour shifts.

The brush was so thick that many times they couldn’t see those searching next to them and they spent a lot of time crawling on their hands and knees. In addition to the briars, the crew also searched through pine forests, pastures and swamps, and encountered poisonous snakes and wild boars. Keefer and Walt once saw a wild boar charge between two members of their crew, sending one of them scrambling up a tree.

"It was actually very funny, because the boar was so covered with the brush it had accumulated, that it looked like a beaver lodge on hooves!" Walt said.

On two of the days, while in the area on the periphery of the "track" NASA had designated, the searchers found nothing; but on all the other days, their efforts were rewarded with pieces of debris ranging in size from an inch or two in length, to pieces that were large and heavy.

The crew walked shoulder to shoulder, doing a scan as they went, and stopping if they found something. Behind the line were representatives from NASA and contractors for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Their purpose was to pick up the GPS (Global Positioning System) locations of significant finds and catalogue them. They also knew what could be handled and what shouldn’t be touched.

By the time the New England crew left, 17% (22,000 pieces) of the spacecraft had been recovered. All the pieces were trucked to the Johnson Space Center for evaluation. Most of what they found were pieces of metal and tile; some of them large enough to have serial numbers visible, so it could be determined where they had been located on the craft.

"We also found parts of a circuit board which could be identified and pieces of debris embedded in the dirt from the force they landed with," Keefer said.

With temperatures ranging from a high if 50 during the daytime to around 30 after dark, trying to keep warm at night was often a futile effort. Fourteen crews slept under the expo barn roof, which was open to the weather at the sides, with tiny tents lined up in rows, and a row of propane heaters in the center. They didn’t work very well at heating the tents, but "at night we’d gather around them to keep warm, like bums around the burn barrel," Walt recalled with a grin.

It was then that they entertained each other by joking and telling tales. One man, a fire chief from Tinmouth, Vt., had a real gift for storytelling, holding everyone spellbound. Walt himself turned his talent for poetry into a 14-verse takeoff on an old epic ballad.

Due to prevailing weather conditions and the red clay soil, the camp became a greasy mud pit when it rained, in spite of the best efforts of the camp personnel. They tried valiantly to keep everyone as dry and comfortable as possible, working on drainage and putting down cattle mats in heavy traffic area. There were portable toilets, tractor-trailers with shower stalls, and a medical services area. Food service was in a huge circus tent.

The Vermonters arrived back in Rutland March 7.

"I was so proud of our New England crew," said Keefer. "We were known for our speed and effectiveness. The NASA people were very appreciative of us. They called us ‘the crew that tore up the woods.’ It was hard work, but we felt like we were doing something very important."

By Martha Slater