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WITNESSES Mysterious boom shatters a calm morning Texans hoped in the first minutes, then despaired By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff and Pat Gordon, Globe Correspondent, 2/2/2003
He spotted the shuttle again yesterday morning, and it looked just as it always did, ''like a flashlight coming at you, with a tail of smoke,'' he said. Then the image lost its familiar form. ''Once it got over the top of me, I saw a big old fireball,'' he said. He continued watching as smaller fireballs and a large piece of silvery metal peeled off. ''By that time it wasn't glowing,'' he said. ''It was smoking.'' To many who live in the shuttle's glide path, the spacecraft had become a part of the skyscape, a regular spectacle blazing a familiar trail above their farms and neighborhoods. Years ago, they had stopped holding their breath, quit worrying about disaster.
So when the wonder of space flight broke apart, rattling their windows and producing a deafening boom, they found other explanations at first: The noise was from a car crash or construction. Pieces of the broken shuttle were military chase jets. The fire was sun shining off metal. Then, later, came another explanation, and the horrible certainty of disaster. ''I realized I had actually seen the shuttle breaking up,'' Watley said. Residents of East Texas heard the disintegration as they fetched morning newspapers and drank first cups of coffee. They felt their beds shake and their windows rattle. In and around Nacogdoches, pieces of the destroyed shuttle rained from the sky: a black shard of metal by a roadside, a half-melted piece of circuit-board on a stairway. Two hundred thousand feet below the place where the seven astronauts perished, ordinary folks gathered around what was left of the spacecraft, lost so close to the end of yet another successful mission. President Bush would later call the loss of the shuttle a tragedy for the entire nation. Residents of Palestine and nearby towns felt themselves closer to it than most. ''I was lying in bed when all of a sudden the bed started shaking,'' said Angela Beil, of Neches, a few miles from Palestine, where some of the Columbia debris landed. ''I had to hold onto it to keep from falling. Then I heard three booms in succession. The windowpanes rattled. The whole house shook.'' At first, Beil, who has lived in California, thought she was feeling an earthquake. Once she learned the shuttle had been destroyed, she headed for nearby Highway 155, where she had heard a piece of the spacecraft had landed. She stayed there for hours, gathered with other somber residents who had come to see the piece of black metal, which had landed on a grassy strip dividing the highway. ''I just feel so bad about what happened,'' Beil said. ''I feel like I'm part of the story, since I heard it. And I just want to stay with the story as long as I can.'' After nine years in the Air Force, Bruce Wright knew the sound he heard at about 8 a.m. was no ordinary sonic boom. Wright, of Waxahachie, about 40 miles from Dallas, was in bed at the time, and his wife, Mary, had just brought the newspaper inside when the shuttle broke apart. He was a student at the University of Texas at Austin when the Challenger exploded in 1986 and has vivid memories of that disaster, he said. When Wright lived in Austin, he had gone up to the roof of his house early one morning with his son to show him the shuttle flying overhead. After he heard news reports of Columbia's destruction, he packed his wife and two sons into his car and began visiting debris sites. His son Chris, 12, carried a video camera to record the day's events, and his younger son Jake, 6, toted a still camera. ''It's a piece of history,'' said his wife, Mary. ''I just feel aghast at what happened,'' said Ruth King, a 77-year-old resident of Elmwood Community, about 12 miles north of Palestine. King, who lives in a renovated old schoolhouse with heavy insulation, said she doesn't usually hear noise from outside. But she heard plenty of it yesterday morning. ''I heard a boom and a rumbling,'' she said. ''It was a really eerie feeling, because I don't normally hear outside noise. I felt vibration along with it.'' In Slocum, about 30 miles from Nacogdoches, Kauyela Oliver, 14, was being driven to her job as a sales clerk at BJ's Hitching Post when she heard a loud boom that shook the windows of her family car. ''We all thought an oil well had blown up,'' she said. ''We got out of the car and looked around and just saw what looked like a puff of smoke in the sky.'' Lionel Whitaker, 37, of Alto, a caseworker for a mental health facility, was lying in bed when the shuttle broke apart. ''The bed started shaking, my ceiling fan was shaking,'' he said. ''Sometimes large trucks make the house shake, but this lasted longer. I was shocked. I've seen the shuttle before when it passed over at night, then it was like watching a shooting star. I was incredibly saddened when I heard the news.'' Doug Ruby and his father were driving along a Texas highway, headed off on a fishing trip, when they apparently caught sight of the shuttle. ''We saw it coming across the sky real bright and shiny and all in one piece. We thought it was the sun shining off an airplane,'' Ruby said. ''Then it broke up in about six pieces. They were all balls of fire, before it went over the tree line.'' Gary Hunziker in Plano said he also saw the shuttle flying overhead. ''I could see two bright objects flying off each side of it,'' he said. ''I just assumed they were chase jets.'' Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, said she heard a loud boom while out walking in her Dallas neighborhood. ''I heard this boom, which I thought was the breaking of the sound barrier, which I've heard many times because we have F-16s here,'' she said. ''I've heard screams and sonic booms before and that's what I thought it was, and then I came home and turned on the television.'' Elbie Bradley was fishing alone on the foggy Toledo Bend reservoir along the Louisiana-Texas state line when he heard something that ''sounded like it was fluttering through the air.'' The object made ''a good splash'' near his boat, he said. ''I thought it was an airplane that hit the lake,'' he said. ''Before the piece came down, it sounded like the start of a big motor without an exhaust on it.'' ''One said he saw a plane breaking up over Shreveport. One said he saw a big ball of fire,'' State Police Sergeant Steve Robinson said. Another caller said a blast ''shook his house.'' Sharon Argumon, 34, of Alto, was working on guard duty, unlocking the cells at a state prison in Rusk when she heard the ''loud, loud boom.'' ''After it happened, then they went outside and found pieces of screen and foam, and we were ordered to do a lock-down and a special count,'' said Argumon, who remembers hearing about the Challenger disaster in typing class as a high school senior. ''I was worried about the people who didn't make it home,'' she said. ''I thought, `Oh, no, not again.''' Globe Correspondent Esther Bauer contributed to this story. Material from the Associated Press was also used.
This story ran on page A18 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
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ALESTINE, Texas - Watching the shuttle pass overhead had become something of a ritual for Larry Watley. Five times in as many years, the East Dallas resident had taken his binoculars to a local park to follow the spacecraft's path overhead.
