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NASA checks debris reports in California
Teams head to 7 sites, including San Jose, Saratoga, Santa Cruz
Carl T. Hall, Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Federal disaster teams and local authorities fanned out across California on Tuesday, from the Bay Area to the southern deserts, to check out what NASA called "credible reports" of Columbia space shuttle debris.
NASA officials today planned to visit at least seven sites in California to examine reports of debris: San Jose, Saratoga, Santa Cruz, Thousand Oaks (Ventura County), Los Angeles, Havileh (Kern County) and San Bernardino.
If any parts of the craft flew off as the orbiter passed over California minutes before the crash, remnants found on the ground could be extremely important clues into the root cause of the disaster, NASA officials say.
Although the main crash site is spread over hundreds of square miles in Texas and Louisiana, investigators suspect the shuttle began to come apart as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere over California on its way to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Scores of tips from the public were fielded by phone and e-mail from locations in California, officials said. Although not all the tips were taken seriously, some have been deemed credible enough to merit investigation in the field.
"It's not clear what the material is, tiles or wing material," NASA shuttle administrator Michael Kostelnik told reporters during a briefing in Washington,
D.C.
As of late Tuesday, officials had not confirmed that any of the materials that had been checked were part of the shuttle.
The search was set off when Arthur Beasley, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology's Owens Valley research facility, reported seeing what apparently was the beginning of the end of the Columbia early Saturday morning.
Early Tuesday, NASA alerted the California Highway Patrol to be on the lookout for pieces of the spaceship. CHP Commissioner D.O. "Spike" Helmick called it "a precautionary measure . . . in the unlikely event that some of the wreckage came to Earth here."
SUSPICIOUS OBJECTS REPORTED
As it turned out, however, the CHP and local sheriff's offices were flooded with calls from the mountains to the beaches.
In Kern County, the sheriff's office reported that an unidentified "rectangular object with green residue" was found on Brooks Road near Lake Isabella, some 40 miles east of Bakersfield. Kern County Sheriff's Commander Steve DelTour said a local resident, whom he would not identify, called in at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday to report seeing the object.
But there was no official word as to the significance of the find. Similar questions remained about other purported finds in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
CHP spokesman Tom Marshall said someone in Antioch reported a piece of suspicious debris, but it turned out to be a scrap of ordinary sheet metal.
He said that none of the debris has been confirmed to be part of the space orbiter. The CHP is not taking custody of the debris and is forwarding the reports it receives to NASA. Marshall said the CHP has not been told how or when the agency plans to follow up on the reports.
Officials in the Environmental Protection Agency's Western region office in San Francisco said they were moving quickly, along with investigators from NASA and other agencies, to investigate the most credible reports.
They warned people not to touch any of the material because of potential toxic exposure from propellants aboard the spacecraft.
Dan Meer, chief of the EPA's response planning and assessment branch in San Francisco, said representatives from NASA arrived Tuesday afternoon from Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert to investigate the potential Bay Area finds.
"We are going out and evaluating it," he said. "We don't have a lot of information now. . . . If anything hazardous is found, we really want to secure the area, isolate it and not let anyone get close."
Some sites, ranging from the beach at Santa Cruz to Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, were being investigated late Tuesday. In Inyo County, the CHP had several reports that turned out to be old pieces of machinery or ceramic tiles from electrical insulation -- all false alarms.
At a Target store in Sacramento, sheriff's deputies collected a small object and turned it over to NASA on Monday, said Sgt. Lou Fatur, a sheriff's department spokesman. Fatur said his office had "no idea if it had anything to do with (the space shuttle)."
INACCESSIBLE TERRAIN
The shuttle's course across California meant it flew high above some of the most remote and inaccessible country in the United States. Much of the higher terrain is covered in snow, and portions of the eastern half of the state are high desert.
"If anything falls into the snow no one is going to find it until spring," said Frank Gerhke, chief of the California snow survey, an agency that monitors the snowfall in the mountains.
Alan Mikuni, regional geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey's Western region, said that satellite images of the orbiter's flight path were being closely analyzed as a possible aid to the search. But the images may be too coarse, he noted, to assist outside the main area of wreckage.
There has been no definitive word as to what might have brought the Columbia down just minutes before its scheduled landing. Leading theories involve damage caused during takeoff from ice or a piece of heat-shielding foam that broke off of an external fuel tank.
Major sections of the shuttle have been discovered in Texas and Louisiana, including pieces of cabin, engine parts, landing gear and a 7-foot piece of what is believed to be part of a wing.
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