Imagine waking up on a Saturday morning to find pieces of...well, you don't quite know what sitting in your front yard. People in a stretch from Corsicana to St. Augustine were finding debris before they even knew what had transpired.
NACOGDOCHES - Efforts to track down debris from the space shuttle Columbia intensified today, as residents in Texas and Louisiana continued to stumble upon human remains and wreckage and investigators looked for clues that may help them piece together the tragedy....
There were no reports of injuries on the ground when shreds of the shuttle showered down, smashing a rooftop, splashing into a reservoir and scattering across farms, homes and businesses.
Columbia's ghastly rain of debris, which included human body parts, was spread across a 100-mile stretch of East Texas, from a field northwest of Palestine to the Toledo Bend reservoir on the Sabine River, where a fisherman heard material splash down near his boat. A piece of tile fell within 75 miles of President Bush's ranch in Crawford.
Authorities urged the public to report any debris but not touch it for fear of contamination from toxic substances. In Many, La., town officials announced they would suspend drawing water from Toledo Bend as a precaution. NASA asks anyone finding debris to call 281-483-3388.
The Army sent in helicopters and soldiers to locate and guard bits of wreckage, which could be pivotal in determining the cause of the disaster.
Bernice Cunningham got a taste of the horror that befell the space shuttle Columbia Saturday morning when she returned to her home in the woods surrounding this Sabine County community and found it littered with bits of metal and rubber from outer space.
She did not witness the spacecraft's final moments, nor did she hear the echoing sonic boom that many across Texas reported. Her experience was much more tangible.
"My husband said it sounded like a hail storm, and he could hear stuff breaking the trees," Cunningham said. "I felt the world was coming to an end."
A few miles away, near the Magnolia Springs Baptist Church, a metallic sphere about 30 inches across landed largely intact. For hours it lay undisturbed in the woods, oozing a yellowish gas across a bed of pine needles and onto the trees.
A charred torso was found near Hemphill, a leg near St. Augustine, as well as other body parts and personal effects strewn over a debris field approximately 100 miles long. It will be weeks, months, perhaps years before all of Columbia is found, if it is even possible to do so. As one member of the Anderson County Sheriff's Department said: "We're going to be finding this stuff for a long time"
