September 2004 · Volume 86 · Number 8

The Day the Sky Fell: The Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster
by Amy Donahue
It is every public official’s worst nightmare: something crashes out of the sky into your community. It’s the one-in-a-billion contingency that you grit your teeth over and hold your breath and hope it doesn’t happen. 
Columbia’s disintegration was both a tragedy and a disaster—a tragedy because the lives of seven heroic astronauts and the life’s work of countless engineers were lost that morning. And a disaster because more than 87,000 pounds of debris from the shuttle were strewn over 2,000 square miles of East Texas and western Louisiana.
But at 8:00 in the morning on Saturday, February 1, 2003, it did happen to the communities of East Texas and western Louisiana. The space shuttle Columbia, on her way back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida after a successful mission, reentered the earth’s atmosphere with unknown damage to her left wing. Columbia broke up over the western United States at 200,000 feet and 12,000 miles per hour.
Columbia’s disintegration was both a tragedy and a disaster—a tragedy because the lives of seven heroic astronauts and the life’s work of countless engineers were lost that morning. And a disaster because more than 87,000 pounds of debris from the shuttle were strewn over 2,000 square miles of East Texas and western Louisiana. What followed was one of the largest search and recovery efforts in history. Ultimately, 25,000 people from 450 organizations worked for 100 days to recover the shattered space shuttle and her crew. At the heart of this intergovernmental, interagency, cross-sector response were the myriad local-level agencies and organizations in whose back yards this event unfolded.
What Happened?
On January 16, the Columbia, with her crew of seven, was launched to begin a scientific research mission. Sixteen days later, Columbia and her crew were lost. As Columbia passed overhead on that last day, observers on the ground in the western United States could see pieces of the shuttle breaking away. People in Texas heard a loud rumbling boom, and wreckage began to fall, generating a debris field that extended 570 miles from near Lubbock, Texas, to Fort Polk, Louisiana.
Some material was as small as postage stamps and fluttered down gently, but other pieces weighed some 800 pounds and came in at upwards of 1,600 miles per hour, augering several feet into the ground. Miraculously, no one was hurt, though there were some near-misses. But the debris was potentially hazardous, and it was everywhere: in people’s yards, on roadways, in cow pastures, on school playgrounds.
Immediately, public officials and emergency responders across Texas and Louisiana swung into action. They activated their command centers and marshaled their resources. They responded to hundreds of calls from citizens and deployed police officers and firefighters to safeguard shuttle material. They worked to understand the situation and coordinated with the media to provide guidance to citizens.
Many local officials described the first several days of the incident as chaotic, with reports, requests, and resources all pouring in at once. Even with the confusion, though, existing plans, relationships, training, and experience allowed communities to respond effectively. They were able to protect their citizens in the immediate term and to position themselves to sustain a major national response over the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, President Bush quickly declared emergencies in Texas and Louisiana, and newly appointed Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge organized recovery efforts under the Federal Response Plan, then in effect. The operation was directed jointly by FEMA, as the lead federal agency for consequence management, and NASA, as the lead agency for the investigation of the accident, with significant leadership roles assumed by: the EPA (for recovery of the debris and mitigation of hazardous materials), the FBI (for recovery of Columbia’s crew), the U.S. Forest Service and Texas Forest Service (for the ground-based search for debris), and the U.S. Navy (for the underwater search).
Disaster field offices were established at a Louisiana Air Force Base and near Dallas, but most federal agencies and many state and local assets converged on the emergency operations center in Lufkin, which ultimately became the nexus of operations. And on February 2, FEMA and NASA agreed that the mission priorities were: 1) to protect the public, 2) to recover the crew, 3) to retrieve the debris, and 4) to compensate local governments for the costs these localities incurred.
For the next two weeks, thousands of responders, many of whom were volunteers, worked to remove hazardous material that had fallen in public areas and to search for the remains of the crew. Police officers, firefighters, Salvation Army and Red Cross volunteers, National Guard troops, urban search and rescue teams, SCUBA divers, horsemen, farmers, ranchers, members of the VFW, forest rangers, private businesses, and many, many others came together with representatives from 30 federal agencies to find Columbia and her crew.
In the end, 597 crews from 44 states had scrambled through thick brush, slogged through mud, confronted rattlesnakes and wild hogs, and braved ice storms, thunderstorms, and tornados to search an area the size of the state of Rhode Island. More limited searches were also conducted in California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico.
Once the immediate danger to the public had been allayed, attention turned in earnest to the accident investigation and to locating and retrieving the thousands of pieces of wreckage that lay across the landscape. It became clear that recovering this material would be a substantial task requiring many weeks of searching by a large, well-organized workforce. This demand exceeded the endurance of local assets alone, who needed to return to the responsibilities in their communities that they had temporarily set aside. 
So, the federal agencies looked to the wildland fire service to search a corridor 10 miles wide from Dallas to the Louisiana border. The Texas Forest Service directed a grid search of a corridor 240 miles long and four miles wide along the orbiter’s flight path, using 20-person fire crews. Five base camps were established in communities along the search corridor, each run by a national incident management team.
In the end, 597 crews from 44 states had scrambled through thick brush, slogged through mud, confronted rattlesnakes and wild hogs, and braved ice storms, thunderstorms, and tornados to search an area the size of the state of Rhode Island. More limited searches were also conducted in California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico.
Simultaneously, 36 helicopters operating out of three air bases searched an additional 1.6 million acres. And the U.S. Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage led an interagency team of divers and analysts operating three types of sonar to search over 23 square miles in two major bodies of water along the flight path, despite wind, low visibility, and submerged obstacles.
As each piece of material was found by searchers, EPA technicians and NASA engineers working side by side with the fire crews tested it for hazardous materials, photographed it, and recorded its location using GPS. The material was recovered, catalogued, packaged, and shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, where the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) assisted NASA in a reconstruction and forensic analysis effort. This investigation ultimately revealed the cause of the accident.
One hundred days of hard work by thousands of people brought the operation to a close. The total ground, air, and water search area had covered over 2.28 million acres. More than 84,000 pieces of material had been recovered, amounting to about 38 percent of the landing-configured weight of the orbiter—an astounding figure, given that the NTSB had predicted that only 10 to 20 percent would be found.
Ultimately, FEMA projected that it would reimburse local governments $10 million for costs associated with the effort. For the recovery operation itself, FEMA had spent about $245 million when the Lufkin Disaster Field Office was finally closed.
Lessons Learned and Reinforced
The Columbia response and recovery effort was certainly a success, both as it related to the future of space flight and as a model of emergency response. As the nation grapples with new homeland security concerns, this operation clearly demonstrates the substantial capabilities of organizations at all levels of government and in the private and nonprofit sectors, as well as the spectacular results that can be achieved when they collaborate to solve difficult problems.
It confirms the resilience and patriotism of U.S. communities in the face of calamity. And it reinforces important lessons about disaster response. Now, as communities work to refine their emergency management systems to meet the demands of today’s social, political, physical, and technological environment, the lessons of Columbia are especially pertinent.
What follows is a sample of the most prominent lessons identified by some of the local government officials who lived and breathed this incident throughout the spring of 2003—a sort of “top 10 list” that may be informative to others working to be prepared.
Lesson 10. Planning makes all the difference. Catastrophes of this magnitude are so rare that it’s hard to focus on them in times of calm, especially when communities face so many immediately pressing public policy concerns. And they’re so unusual that it’s hard to plan for them. Most communities don’t have annexes in their emergency plans for “Space Shuttle Crash.” Nonetheless, the benefits of contingency planning are measurable and manifold when things do go wrong.
Public officials in Nacogdoches, Texas, attest to the payback they reaped from having recently completed a hazard mitigation planning effort. As the county sheriff recounted, “The whole time we were drafting these plans, you’re thinking tornadoes, hurricanes . . . Never in our wildest dreams did we envision something like a space shuttle crashing upon our county. But [planning] played a crucial part. When this incident happened, we didn’t spend the first two or three hours scrambling around, trying to figure out, ‘Who can I call to get this done? Who can I call to get that done?’ We already knew what our resources were.”
Despite the apparent idiosyncrasy of this catastrophe, though, many truths emerged that readily apply to any large-scale incident. It is hoped that communities working to protect their citizens can learn from the Columbia event. In the long run, the pain of the terrible tragedy of February 1 might be eased a little in our minds if future responses can benefit.
As all who have attempted it know, however, sound planning is a difficult process. To promote success when the worst actually happens, planning efforts must have integrity, be specific, and make the hard choices. Planning efforts that are halfhearted or watered down by compromise or that exist only for show will not hold up.
Lesson 9. Focus on problem solving. Large incidents are idiosyncratic. While they have common characteristics, much about them doesn’t “fit the rules.” The Columbia incident is a case in point, a contingency that no one had imagined, much less predicted. Thus, these events are better addressed with flexible guidelines than with rigid rules and fixed processes.
The Columbia response succeeded in part because the state and local governments involved gave their people enough discretion to determine what needed to be done in the specific circumstances they faced and to make decisions in real time. Leaders were accountable within broad areas of authority for solving the problem at hand, rather than measured by the extent to which they followed procedures.
Lesson 8: Identify capabilities and resource needs ahead of time. Local officials in the communities along Columbia’s flight path suddenly faced a major resources management challenge. In the first few hours of February 1, local government managers were not immediately sure what they needed and how it would be used and were reluctant to activate resources unnecessarily.
At the same time, they did not want to be caught short if the incident turned out to be larger than they initially guessed. On top of these concerns, managers had to decide what to do with offers of help coming in from all over the country, some solicited but many not. And once the managers had obtained the resources they needed, they had to deploy them, direct them, track them, support them—and pay for them.
One county judge recounted an example: “Then we began getting horses in to do the mounted patrol search, and then we had to find hay and feed for the horses, line up veterinarians for the horses, which we did. So, as resources came in, there was a whole ’nother set of issues attached to those resources.”
Lesson 7. Overcome jurisdictional conflicts. A central reason for the success of the Columbia recovery effort was the level of collaboration. The interagency turf battles that so often plague emergency responses were almost absent. As one local official noted, “The remarkable thing is that out of between 70 and 80 agencies that were there, there wasn’t the first unkind word. There was no power play, no power struggle. Everybody there just knew that the job was there to be done, and all of us had the same purpose.”
So commonly on large-scale incidents, multiple agencies with legitimate authority and overlapping jurisdictions fight to exercise control. This didn’t happen on Columbia because the lead agencies explicitly worked to develop common understanding of the mission, universal buy-in to the division of responsibility, and clearly articulated priorities. Importantly, these were then institutionalized by the use of daily planning meetings. Operational objectives were regularly revisited and clarified to ensure that congruence across agencies and levels of government persisted throughout the operation.
Lesson 6. Don’t compromise on training. The Columbia response reaped the benefit of the commitment to good training that distinguishes many organizations in Texas and Louisiana. One state police captain explained: “We practice and practice and practice. We drill our emergency preparedness, and it’s clear that because of that, we were able to respond and respond well, not in a haphazard way, and we were able to bring a lot of things to the table that probably no one expected that we could. But it was because of those drills and that training and those relationships that we’ve made and we’ve built that we knew who could do what, what agency, and sometimes which person in which agency, and maybe even where some of the pitfalls would be and where the shortfalls would come.”
Developing and conducting a sophisticated training program is a significant endeavor. Sometimes, governments find it hard to devote time and resources to notional exercises when there are so many real and present demands. Political interests also mean that exercises must show off success rather than reveal failings. Exercises that only show off success make it hard to identify and correct weaknesses. Without good training, however, the Columbia response would have been a disaster in and of itself.

Responders worked to remove material from Columbia that fell on public areas.
Lesson 5. Understand the feds, and help them understand you. Large-scale incidents will almost certainly involve federal agencies and, in cases of national assets or interests, may be run by them. Given that even these kinds of disasters are local in their effect, and that local governments remain responsible for the lives and property of their citizens, balancing federal involvement can be a complex challenge for managers.
The reality is that many in the federal government do not understand local capabilities very well, and even those who do are still unlikely to be familiar with any particular jurisdiction. And federal agencies also tend to make one-size-fits-all decisions meant to apply across a diverse array of localities. Thus, local officials will need to educate federal responders, probably multiple times over the course of a long-duration incident.
This is certainly a legitimate frustration, as local jurisdictions are likely to mount a crucial response from the moment a disaster begins, and this response may later be discounted or superseded. Many times during the Columbia operation, helpful local expertise was forgone by federal responders.
In one case, a local government manager explained that “[my fire chief] knows every dirt road and pig trail in this county, and after the third or fourth day, rather than providing local knowledge, he was changing out garbage-can bags, that type thing.” This was not intentional but a casualty of the breadth of the operational decisions being made. In effect, large-scale solutions often lose fidelity, and local governments must expect this and determine how to contend with it.
Lesson 4. Information is hard to obtain, validate, and share. At the core of any operation is information. One of the biggest frustrations expressed by local officials during the Columbia response was how hard it was for them to get the information they needed to direct their operations appropriately.
In part, this was because good information just didn’t exist early on, but it was also because federal agencies were not always forthcoming. In some cases, federal authorities needed to protect sensitive information and were legitimately reluctant to distribute it. In other cases, however, it simply didn’t occur to the feds that local governments would need information to be able to act.
One local judge said, “I was expecting information to flow down to us on what we needed to do, how we needed to do it, some very specific instructions that would provide guidance to us for making decisions. And I felt like that information would flow to us in an organized, structured fashion. That didn’t happen.”
To add insult to injury, when there was information to share, it was hard to distribute, especially given the need for security and the lack of infrastructure in rural East Texas. It fell to managers to tackle these problems. They had to actively seek information, figuring out who had it and convincing them to share it. They had to recognize that early information was likely to be inaccurate. As data improved, managers had to continuously adjust their operations to account for the changed data.
They also had to institutionalize mechanisms by which other agencies would continue to keep them “in the loop.” Importantly, these relationships also allowed locals to pass back information from the field that could improve the overall operation.
Lesson 3. Complex incidents require sophisticated management. To the frustration of the local governments, who were pressed by immediate emergency response demands, it took time for a coherent incident command structure to emerge, and there were plenty of flaws in the system that solidified. But it also had many attributes that ought to be replicated.
Most especially, decision authority was shared by a group of agencies that worked closely together to resolve the incident. The Columbia recovery operated—in spirit, if not formally—as a unified command.
It is important, though, for all of the agencies involved to be aware of the incident command structure that will operate. On the Columbia response, a command structure did exist in the disaster field office, but even after several weeks of operation, many local governments still couldn’t tell who was in charge. The new National Incident Management System and National Response Plan are designed to help solve this kind of problem. They are founded in the principles of unified command and incident command systems.
Debates rage about what these concepts really mean. But a fundamental lesson of Columbia is that mechanisms that facilitate collaboration and a common decision-making framework are extremely valuable.
Lesson 2. Be proactive about communication. One of the hardest things to do well during a large-scale incident is to communicate. On Columbia, there were hundreds of agencies involved, most of which did not know the others. They were spread over an extremely large area, making it hard for them to meet face-to-face.
The rural terrain lacked a robust communications infrastructure, so even remote conversations were hard. On top of these problems, the initial leadership structure was diffuse, with federal, state, and local field offices, operations centers, and command posts all directing parts of the operation.
The need to coordinate well did prompt the initiation of a series of regular meetings and teleconferences, which helped to facilitate information sharing and decision making and eventually became institutionalized as part of the operation. Nonetheless, local governments had to be proactive about engaging federal agencies, which often did not think to introduce themselves to the leaders of the communities in which they were working.
Lesson 1. Relationships matter. Success at all of the lessons mentioned so far comes down to one common element: relationships. Agencies and jurisdictions that know each other work together better. In fact, perhaps the most important benefits of joint planning and training are not the plans or skills themselves but the familiarity and understanding that accrue among the agencies involved.
Building habitual relationships in times of relative peace and calm with those who will be partners during a crisis eases and enables communication, coordination, and cooperation. Mutual understanding reduces the chaos and confusion that arise simply from lack of familiarity and allows organizations to operate more seamlessly. Perhaps, a silver lining to the Columbia incident is the host of new relationships that were forged over the course of that event and that may support future disaster responses.
Contributions
The search and recovery operation that brought Columbia home contributed crucially to the future of the nation’s space program by making it possible for the accident investigators to determine the cause of the accident. It also contributed importantly to our nation’s security by demonstrating that such a successful initiative can be mounted in the face of dire necessity. And the thousands who supported the effort can count themselves members of the NASA family who will forever garner NASA’s heartfelt gratitude.
That effort was a one-of-a-kind event in many ways. It was an event like no one had ever encountered before, and there was no template for how to respond. It was larger in scale and scope than most disasters, involving hundreds of jurisdictions spanning the southwestern United States and requiring a vast array of human and capital resources.
It involved a national asset, calling for the federal government to play a direct leadership role. It coincided with one of the most significant government reorganizations in history, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. And it happened as we were heading for war in Iraq.
Despite the apparent idiosyncrasy of this catastrophe, though, many truths emerged that readily apply to any large-scale incident. It is hoped that communities working to protect their citizens can learn from the Columbia events. In the long run, the pain of the terrible tragedy of February 1 might be eased a little in our minds if future responses can benefit.
Amy Donahue is senior adviser to the administrator, NASA, Washington, D.C., and assistant professor, department of public policy, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut (telephone, 860/486-4519; e-mail, amy.donahue@uconn.edu).