'It's just horrible'
Posted on 02/01/2003 6:30:52 PM PST by MeekOneGOP
'It's just horrible'
02/01/2003
From the suburbs north of Dallas to the far reaches of East Texas, residents heard a deafening explosion and saw flaming debris rain from the sky Saturday as the space shuttle Columbia apparently disintegrated minutes from a scheduled landing.
Arlington resident James McAdams, 64, said he found some baseball-sized rubble in his front yard when he picked up his morning newspaper. He described it as "jagged on one section, white on one side and the other side is purple to black like it's been burned."
"The FBI is here and they are waiting on further orders on what to do with it," Mr. McAdams said. "They have it roped it off to make sure nobody touches it."
Jim and Brenda Cunningham rose early to watch the shuttle pass over their Plano home. They telephoned their son, Ryan, who was watching from his apartment on the west side of Plano. Jim Cunningham said as the craft approached from the west, he saw what he thought were flares. "There were four pieces all flying in formation around the main body of the shuttle just as it went out of view," he said.
"I thought, - Well, maybe it's supposed to look like that. - When the segments became so large, you knew it wasn't supposed to look like that. It was not a pleasant thing to see once we knew what was happening" Mr. Cunningham said. "We heard the report on TV that they lost contact with the shuttle and that's when you have to admit that it was as bad as we thought it was. It's just horrible. You have to feel for the crew and their families."
Columbia had been expected to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:16 a.m. NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with Columbia as the ship soared across Texas at an altitude of about 200,000 feet while traveling at six times the speed of sound. All seven astronauts aboard were killed as the shuttle broke apart in flames.
In Nacogdoches, where much of the debris was centered, dozens of bits of machinery and metal were strewn across the city.
AP Residents spotted mechanical debris in Nacogdoches. |
Allison Haley, a Stephen F. Austin University student, was waiting for her boss to open the doors at a Nacogdoches clothing store when she saw something drop from the sky about six feet from her car.
"It's about 5 inches long and it looks like a piece of burned metal and it has an oily substance on it. Later we saw more debris coming down, just hanging in the sky, and it was white," she said.
When Darlene Johnson got to work at the downtown Yakofritz Sandwich Shop, she found a piece of metal the size of a car door in the bank parking lot next door.
"It hit the ground so hard it tore up the pavement and there are pieces of concrete scattered. It's a large piece of metal and you can tell where it's been burned," she said.
Cindy Davis, 43, heard a "kaboom" and felt the explosion at her home in Price, about 60 miles north of Nacogdoches.
"It was like someone was trying to get in my front door. It was rattling back and forth, the widows were vibrating and the light fixtures shook," she said.
Ms. Price said she tried to locate the source, but didn't see anything when she went outside.
"I called my husband on his mobile out in the pasture and he said he heard it but didn't see anything. I turned on the TV and they said the shuttle was flying over East Texas and they lost communication," she said. "I knew what happened."
The commotion startled residents, who say the city of 30,000 is usually sedate.
"We have a school and post office. Nothing ever happens here," Ms. Price said. "It just breaks your heart that in that 16 minutes they would land and their family was waiting on them."
NASA enthusiast Roxanne Craig, 48, had been tracking the shuttle's progress overnight and saw that it was going to soar past her southwest Corsicana home. "So I got the video camera ready. When I saw it going through New Mexico I decided to get outside," she said. "At first it appeared the shuttle was intact and as it got closer it started throwing out sparkles and we weren't sure what that was. The vapor trail was very massive and widespread."
Ms. Craig said she went inside and heard on TV that NASA had lost communication with the shuttle. Moments later, she heard two loud booms that shook her house. Later, the family found two nugget-size pieces of debris in their driveway.
"They were about the size of a quarter and they were very shiny aluminum," she said. "The police wouldn't let us touch them. They put them in baggies and took them."
The explosion was heard as far away as Edgewood, N.M., a town of 5,000 some 25 miles east of Albuquerque.
"At first I thought something had fallen in the attic like a water heater. It jarred the roof of our house," Mark Winscott said. "Then I talked to my dad who said the shuttle had blown up."
E-mail kdurnan@dallasnews.com
Watch WFAA-TV (Ch. 8) and TXCN (Cable Ch. 38 in Dallas area) for news updates throughout the day and read more in tomorrow's Dallas Morning News .
COLUMBIA
Like snow, on green pines
Floating, flying to heaven:
Seven falling stars
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