S. Utah valley combed for shuttle wreckage

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 23, 2003 | by Nancy PerkinsDeseret News correspondent

HOP VALLEY, Washington County -- Dean Cox doesn't doubt that debris from the space shuttle Columbia landed somewhere in southern Utah.

He's even more certain the aging shuttle was already breaking up by the time it streaked across the skies above St. George.

Cox, the county's emergency services director and a licensed pilot, shot video of Columbia's re-entry that clearly shows something separating from the main shuttle.

"It was almost dead overhead when I saw a piece come off," Cox said on Saturday as he helped coordinate a NASA-requested ground search for shuttle debris in the Kolob mountain area near Zion National Park.

NASA identified the search site as one that has a high probability of shielding shuttle debris, Cox said.

Search and rescue volunteers, including members of the National Park Service, civil air patrol and sheriff's office, combed this sandy valley choked with tangled clumps of scrub oak and juniper trees for the second day and found little to show NASA, Cox said.

"I wish I could tell you we found something significant," said Cox after wrapping up the day's search efforts. "I'm hopeful but not confident that we'll find something."

A NASA investigator arrived late Saturday and will be taken to the site today to examine what searchers did find. Among the few items deemed strange or out-of-place for the area are a tattered scrap of black rubber peppered with oddly shaped holes and a couple of pieces of thin, red fiberglass with the letter "E" raised on its black underside.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, except that would be easier since we'd know then what we were looking for," said Washington County Sheriff Kirk Smith. "We all feel this is a very important search, and we want to do all we can to help solve the mystery of what happened to Columbia."

Volunteers also found several small scraps of aluminum in a remote part of Nevada Saturday, but it was not immediately clear whether they belonged to the spacecraft. Col. Matt Wallace, commander of the Nevada Wing Civil Air Patrol, said each piece was several inches long and looked like aluminum foil. He said they were bagged and taken to a field camp, where they will be sent to a NASA laboratory.

In Utah, an organized search of more than 5 square miles kept nearly 60 volunteers busy as they scoured Hop Valley and the surrounding red cliffs. Several volunteers with special training used 250-foot ropes to rappel down the cliff sides in an effort to give those areas a once over. Anything found and considered unusual was tagged and noted on a grid map posted at base camp.

"We'll let NASA reserve the right to take a closer examination of these items and determine what we've got," said Cox, who will ask Iron County search and rescue teams to help out today. "NASA's the ultimate authority here."

On Friday, a state helicopter flew over the Utah site, as did a civil air patrol plane. Nothing unusual was noticed during those fly- overs, said Smith. Several local residents were called to offer their help in the search, he said, but those people were told to stay home.

NASA is still looking for home video or other photos taken of the shuttle as it passed over southern Utah. Cox said his video is important to the space agency because it helps solidify a time line for the shuttle's breakup.

"NASA wanted to know what time I took the video and whether there were any stars in the camera's viewpoint," said Cox, who has forwarded the images to NASA. "The timing information seems really critical. I can say with a high degree of accuracy that a piece of the shuttle fell off over the St. George area at 6:56:04 a.m. NASA lost contact with the shuttle less than four minutes after I shot that video."

Contributing: Associated Press

E-mail: nperkins@infowest.com