Rain hampers search for debris

NACOGDOCHES, Texas - Under rain clouds that threatened to hamper their search, authorities returned to the forests of East Texas on Monday to hunt for more debris from the space shuttle Columbia and remains of its seven astronauts.\nHundreds of investigators with expertise in airline accidents, engineering and forensics converged on Texas and Louisiana to join in the painstaking job of retrieving pieces of wreckage from a huge swath of forested country.\nTeams of global positioning satellite technicians were back in the field at daybreak to continue logging the location of debris for investigators, said James Kroll, director of the Emergency Geospacial Mapping Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.\n"We're still out there. We've got 15 teams mapping stuff all over, if they ever decide to come pick it up," Kroll said.\nAs overwhelmed local authorities scrambled to locate and guard objects in the sprawling debris field, NASA established command posts in Lufkin and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to oversee recovery and examination of the wreckage.\nAbout 300 people from 30 agencies were being assigned to collect thousands of pieces as small as pebbles and as big as pickup trucks.\nOnce in hand, the wreckage will be trucked to Barksdale, where engineers from shuttle contractor United Space Alliance will sort through it in search of clues to what caused Columbia to break apart over Texas on Saturday morning just minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida.\nTheir goal is to reconstruct what is left of Columbia and establish a sequence of how each part peeled off during its high-speed re-entry into the atmosphere.\nThe salvage operation covers an area that stretches from the rolling hills of East Texas to a suburb of New Orleans, where authorities found what could be insulation from Columbia.\nLouisiana state police confirmed more than a dozen chunks of debris in eight different parishes.\nThe search for wreckage has focused on Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry said 33 counties had reported debris.\nThe heart of the operation is East Texas, a region of thick forests of pines and oaks, expansive farm land and cow pastures. It holds four national forests, covering almost 700,000 acres, and two reservoirs that together span about 300,000 acres. The thick woods also are home to wild hogs and bobcats.\nWhile the region is a magnet for hunters, boaters and anglers, its challenging terrain makes the job facing Columbia recovery teams that much more difficult.\n"This is forest - dense forest," said James Kroll, director of the Emergency Geospacial Mapping Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. "There is no way to describe how many pieces there are and how spread over the landscape they are.\n"Ten years from now, folks are going to be walking around the woods and finding stuff."\nIn Nacogdoches County alone, authorities have logged more than 1,200 confirmed debris sites. State troopers and local authorities didn't have enough personnel to protect every piece, but they manned 130 spots to guard debris against scavengers.\nThey said NASA had provided a list of priorities: anything that could contain data or resembles computer circuitry, or potentially radioactive materials.\nAmong the items discovered so far: a car-size chunk that splashed into Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana state line, a 7- to 8-foot door-like fragment, what resembles part of a windshield and a 5- to 6-foot-long object authorities suspect could be part of the landing gear.\nIn San Augustine, just east of Nacogdoches, Larry Epps placed a 55-gallon barrel to protect a piece of metal that landed in his hay meadow.\n"If it hit me, my wife would have been a widow," he said of the hollow gray object that resembles a tire. He later found what appears to be a circuit board about 100 yards away from his front yard and a half dozen 2-by-2-inch metal pieces in his meadow.\nMarc Masferrer, editor of The Lufkin Daily News, said a landowner led him to what appeared to be a seat from the shuttle in a pasture 20 miles west of Nacogdoches.\nThere have been more grim discoveries - human remains, including a leg, torso, thigh bone and skull. NASA confirmed the remains of some of the seven Columbia astronauts had been recovered.