But it didn’t take long before they realized the sound they’d heard was of the space shuttle, which had disintegrated just minutes before its scheduled landing at 9:16 a.m. ET. In the minutes and hours after the explosion, pieces of machinery and other debris began to rain down over East Texas.
Nacogdoches, a small tourist town located about 140 miles northeast of Houston, declared a state of emergency. And a spokeswoman said the city’s emergency operations center had received more than 500 calls and located more than 100 pieces of debris by mid-afternoon. The National Guard and NASA personnel worked side-by-side with the police department to recover debris. NASA has warned residents to steer clear of any debris because of possible toxic substances present in some of the materials.
The space shuttle was traveling more than 207,000 feet above Texas at a speed of about 12,500 miles per hour (Mach 18) when it exploded, according to NASA officials. There were no indications of “the impending threat” until about 9 a.m. ET, when the crew reported a loss of temperature sensors on the hydraulic system on the left wing. That was followed by reports of several other problems, NASA said. NASA investigators cautioned that it was too soon to know the cause of the disaster, but an investigation had been launched. On the ground in Texas, some residents knew the shuttle would be flying overhead on its way back to Kennedy Space Center, and were watching in in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the streaking Columbia. Here are what some of them saw and heard.
Gary Hunziker, Plano, Texas: “I heard on the radio last night that the shuttle would be going over so my wife and I got up at 8:00 and went on the patio to watch it go by. To the naked eye everything appeared normal. The fuselage was burning bright and there were contrails behind it. I had binoculars and I looked and I said to my wife, ‘Oh my god. There are chase planes with it already.’ But I’m thinking it was far too high and fast for that to be happening already. It looked like a nice glide. About 15 minutes later I turned on the TV and the first thing I hear is that we’re lost visual and radar contact with the shuttle and it dawned on me that those weren’t chase planes. It was the shuttle breaking up. I didn’t hear any of the noise.”
Trudy Orton, Red Oak, Texas: “It sounded like a natural gas explosion. I had just woken up, and I was standing in my doorway halfway onto the porch taking my dog out when I heard a massive explosion. My house shook and the windows rattled. I knew this wasn’t any ordinary sonic boom. My neighbors were outside loading their car and they looked at me and said, “What on earth was that?” It was so loud it scared me to death. I was petrified. My little dog ran in the house and hid. I looked up, and all I saw was white streak of smoke to the east of my home. It wasn’t a sleek little straight line like the jets make. It was billowing like a puffy cloud. My husband was at work about a half hour away and he called me not five minutes later to see if I was OK. He heard it too, all the way over where he was. It was like nothing I ever heard. It scared me to death.”
Patricia Gore, Wills Point, Texas (50 miles east of Dallas): “There was a huge boom, and then it sounded like a locomotive train. The first thing I thought was that it was a gas pipeline in our pasture. Then we looked up in the sky and saw the vapor trail.”
Roger Johnson, a communications officer in the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department (just north of Nacodoches): “The phone as been ringing off the hook, probably 300 people have called in. It rattled doors, houses, windows. First it was a boom, and then it sounded like rolling thunder, but louder.”
