Thousands of wildland firefighters to search for shuttle debris

Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003 | 10:25 a.m.

Accustomed to little sleep and with an eye for hot spots, Darrell Bull Shoe is among thousands of wildland firefighters expected to soon be combing the East Texas landscape for debris from the space shuttle Columbia.

With the Western fire season still a few months away, "everything's pretty much down time," said Bull Shoe, a firefighter from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. The opportunity to search for fallen shuttle pieces is a chance to "do something different," he said.

And with Texas approaching a spring that could hide bits of debris beneath new greenery, NASA needs all the eyes and hands it can get.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency expects about 4,000 firefighters from more than 20 states to be searching the piney woods of East Texas for remnants of the Columbia's Feb. 1 explosion. The shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

About a thousand firefighters from the South started work last weekend, and a second team of 1,000 began searching Thursday. After undergoing training, two more teams of 1,000 members will be in the field by the weekend or early next week, said Kim Pease, a FEMA spokesman.

"These teams are going out and searching grid areas, and they're being very meticulous to take it slow and trying to identify any material that may be out there," he said.

Firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, local fire departments and Indian reservations will work in squads of 20 and will be joined by representatives from FEMA, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, Pease said.

Prime fire season usually doesn't begin until June, leaving firefighters as an obvious choice to search for shuttle material.

"They are supposed to be the best of the best," Pease said. "They're trained at this. They know what they're doing. They can work the long hours. They're fit."

Much like fire season, crews will stay in tents at base camps - this time in the Texas communities of Nacogdoches, Palestine, Hemphill and Corsicana.

"It's basically the same thing that we do, doing a grid lining up the crew together," said Marvin Roybal, a crew boss from the Forest Service in Penasco, N.M., who will leave for Texas on Friday. "(Usually) we're looking for smoke and stuff. In this case, we'll be looking for parts of the shuttle."

The primary search area is 10 miles wide and 240 miles long, a massive area that firefighters will have to work through fast. Spring foliage in mid- to late March will make it more difficult for crews to spot new materials or find sites that have been marked for pickup.

"That's what they're working against," Pease said. "They're working against the time the ground foliage starts sprouting and they're not going to be able to see that stuff anymore."

Many firefighters being sent are from Western states - Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon, California, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. They will work anywhere from 14- to 30-day stints, the BLM and Forest Service said.

"I don't think it'll bother any of us," said Bull Shoe, a 25-year firefighter who will be a crew leader. "It'll kind of depend on what's found. Most of these people on the fire line adapt to different situations."

Chuck Dickson, a captain with the Kern County Fire Department in California, was in Palestine, Texas, Thursday with a crew of 692 firefighters. Dickson, a spokesman for the base camp, expected 120 more firefighters to arrive later Thursday.

"We're in training mode right now," he said as rain pelted the livestock building where the class was being held. "We do some field work to show them how to do grid work.

"You don't just walk through a field."

---

EDITOR'S NOTE - Angie Wagner is the AP's Western regional writer, based in Las Vegas.

---

On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov