Local FS crew searches for shuttle debris

Jeremy Fields (left), Brian See and Nate Goodwin have returned from shuttle recovery work in Texas. Photo by Dave Priest

Last month's loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia affected us all, but some local Forest Service employees were impacted more directly than most.

Jeremy Fields, Nate Goodwin and Brian See are Sisters Ranger District employees who were part of a Central Oregon team dispatched to Texas to take part in the search and recovery of shuttle debris.

Sisters resident Ben Curtis also made the trip as part of the Bend-Fort Rock crew.

As soon as smoking debris from the lost shuttle began falling to earth from the skies over Texas, on-scene emergency personnel and volunteers began the grim and exhausting work of finding, cataloging and recovering pieces of the doomed spacecraft.

It soon became apparent that the task was more than local resources could handle, and a call went out for outside help. The Sisters men were among those answering that call.

They were part of a crew of 20 that, in addition to Forest Service personnel, included representatives from the Prineville Bureau of Land Management office. The crew left for Texas on February 18 and returned March 6.

The first leg of their journey was by van to Idaho, where they joined up with other crews and boarded a charter flight to Texas.

Once on-scene, they set up camp and received training before their field work began.

"We were subjected to quite a few bad storms and spent the first couple of days sleeping in tents in the mud," said squad boss Jeremy Fields, who normally works as a silviculturist in Sisters but doubles as a forest firefighter, too.

"I've never seen rain like that before," said Fields. "We were literally in mud up to our boot tops. The impressive thing was seeing how everyone kept their spirits up and stayed positive."

Eventually, the crew moved their tents into a six-acre warehouse with a concrete floor, but at least they were out of the rain at night.

"There were more than 800 people in that warehouse," Fields said. "A typical day was breakfast at 0500 (5 a.m.) and back no earlier than 1830 (6:30 p.m.). Some days we'd work 14 to 15 hours."

Various sources indicate that the crews have recovered thousands of shuttle parts.

"Every person in our crew found about 15 pieces," Fields said. "I know that I found 21 pieces."

With some chagrin, he admitted that he was one of the last in the crew to find a piece, but his first find was "a piece of significance."

Fields said the largest piece that he recovered was about six inches square and three inches thick. His smallest find was about the size of a dime.

The largest piece found by the Central Oregon crew was about 16 by 24 inches.

"The pieces we found were scorched," Field said. "We were told what some of the parts were and from what part of the ship, but we aren't supposed to speak about that.

"After a few days of finding parts, you begin to recognize them. The shuttle had 126,000 ceramic tiles, so the majority of the pieces we found were (tile pieces)."

NASA and EPA officials shadowed the searchers to help verify and catalogue the items.

"We met some of the astronauts," Fields said, "including the chief astronaut, who personally picked the crew members for the Columbia mission."

If a particular piece of recovered shuttle debris was believed to be especially significant, NASA personnel sometimes took GPS coordinates at the spot of the find.

Among the more unusual sites searched were "wild pig pens" that Fields said were associated with private hunting farms.

"We saw one armadillo and three or four diamondback rattlesnakes. We heard of one crew running into a herd of wild emus."

Fields said that at one farm, a boy came out to meet them and gave them a bag of shuttle debris he had recovered from his property.

"I can tell you that, on average, we covered about 10 miles a day," he said. "One day, they 'GPSed' us and determined that our crew and the Mt. Putnam (Idaho) crew covered 4,000 acres."

The area searched by the local crew was near Palestine, Texas, about 50 miles west of Nacogdoches, which was described by news reports as the center of the debris concentration.

When they returned from Texas late last week, the local men were tired but happy about the role they played in what was truly a national drama.

"I felt very honored to go and have this opportunity," said Fields. "Despite how hard it was at times, we stuck it out and hopefully made Deschutes proud."