Posted on 02/02/2003 3:23:34 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
'It just kept rolling and thundering'
For Texans, hearing was believing that something wasn't quite right
02/02/2003
Vaudie Dowdy of Tyler gazed out her big picture window, using a quiet Saturday morning to think and pray.
Ken Foster sat at his kitchen table in Rowlett, reading newspaper stories about war and terrorism.
Gary Hunziker and his wife stepped onto their patio in Plano to watch the space shuttle Columbia fly overhead.
Suddenly, an explosion rattled windows and shook rooftops across North Texas and East Texas. To people waking to the new day, it was the sound of the sky falling. To the controller at NASA's mission control, it was a grim "contingency." And for all Americans facing fears of war and terrorism, the instinctive reaction was, "What next?"
"I have not heard a noise like that since the New London school blew up," said Mrs. Dowdy, 82, referring to a natural gas explosion that killed hundreds of students and teachers in East Texas in 1937. "A great tragedy," she knew, had once again struck Texas - and the rest of the nation.
Residents across East and North Texas shared her fear, anxiety and grief as Saturday morning's calm was shattered by the explosion of the shuttle. In an era of terrorism, and with the possibility of war approaching, many are conditioned to expect the worst.
"It was a big shock," said Mr. Foster, 40, a banker. "It sounded like something fell on the house. I said, 'Oh, hell - what is that!' It was a 'BOOM!' - like none I've ever heard before. ... After Sept. 11, with anything unusual like this, I immediately think we're being attacked. And because of the cautious nature I've developed, it's made me somewhat unnerved when anything like this occurs. I feel much more anxiety about things like this, if only because they occur in a post-Sept. 11 context."
'The house shook'
In Carrollton, John Ferolito, 60, prepared for a bike ride with a cycling club. The boom sounded overhead.
"The house shook, and the windows rattled," he said. "I ran outside and looked in the alley and the yard. I thought, 'Maybe the shuttle set off a sonic boom.'... I turned on the news and heard they'd lost contact with the shuttle. I got that the same feeling I did in 1986 [with the Challenger explosion] - that things weren't right."
In Plano, Mr. Hunziker, 49, and his wife went outside to view the shuttle. "At that point, the shuttle was almost due south and had a very substantial vapor trail," he said. "I had some field glasses... The shuttle was flying east. I had a devil of a time finding it in the binoculars. When I did, it was well east of us. I said to my wife, 'Look, chase jets have already intercepted it.' It looked like two bright spots immediately to the side and behind the shuttle. Twenty minutes later, I turned on the TV and realized that what I saw wasn't chase jets at all - but debris from an explosion."
In East Plano, a fire of unknown origin started on the roof of a condominium at Park Boulevard and Ridgewood Drive. It drew spasms of panicked speculation. Frantic residents blamed the fire on debris raining down from the shuttle, saying no other cause was possible. Officials were still investigating the fire Saturday night and would not confirm the cause.
In Garland, Marcella Seeley, 47, a print production manager, said the blast shook her from a sound sleep.
"It sounded like something had crashed into the window or the roof," she said. "So I went outside, thinking some kids were playing football and had hit my house with it. It was that loud. A few minutes later, I turned on the TV and said, 'Oh, my God!' "
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was walking in her North Dallas neighborhood.
"And I heard this boom," she said. "I thought it was a sonic boom, which I mentioned to my friend, with whom I was walking. It was so pronounced, I thought it must be an F-16 training overhead. But then I came home and turned on the television and found out quickly what it really was."
Within minutes, the senator telephoned NASA officials and offered them the use of her Dallas office as an emergency command post.
At White Rock Lake, Murray Forsvall, a former journalist, said he and about 150 runners looked up from their morning jog to see "a wide vapor trail. It was like a 50-yard line seat. We thought it was an airplane. But someone said, 'It has a tail.' We continued to watch, and just seconds later it all broke up into smaller pieces."
In East Texas, Larry Weisinger, 52, a Chandler pipe welder, was fishing on Lake Palestine. He and his brother were lazily adrift on the calm waters, hoping to hook a striped bass. "We were just sittin' there in our boat," he said, "when all of a sudden, I said, 'What was that sound?' It just kept rolling and thundering. I said, 'It sounds like Texas Eastman just blew up," referring to the Eastman Kodak chemical plant in Longview.
Near Red Springs, Danny McDaniel, 54, an ex-Marine and barbecue cook, said "a big boom" sent his dog scrambling for cover. "We didn't know what was going on. The whole house shook. A friend of mine said it sounded just like an earthquake." His neighbors said their dogs and livestock behaved strangely even before the blast occurred.
Sound and debris
In Canton, Kelli Clower, 25, a reimbursement manager at Terrell State Hospital, was changing her 2-year-old son's diaper when her home shook violently. "I thought a tree had hit the house," she said. "We have big pine trees, and I thought a limb from one of the pine trees had fallen and hit the house. And then my grandmother from Arkansas called, telling me about the space shuttle."
In Rockett, near Waxahachie, Mary Sinyard lay on the couch of her mobile home, chatting on the phone with her daughter. She looked out the window. She saw fiery debris streak across the sky, then appear to stop in mid-air and fall, until it disappeared from sight.
For a minute or so, the boom shook the mobile home and rattled its windows.
In Center, about 20 miles northeast of Nacogdoches, environmental consultant Trey Rushing, 51, of Austin had just bought some work gloves at a discount store to fend off the chill as he headed toward a demolition job.
"I just happened to come out of the Wal-Mart and look up in the sky, and there was this bright object going from the north to the south. It was weird," he said. The object looked "like a brilliant, blue-white flare," he said.
He said he thought he was witnessing an F-16 fighter pilot in the midst of war-training exercises, dropping "chaff" to evade being hit by enemy rockets.
But the trail from the shuttle was too low, and the falling objects were burning too brightly for it to be a jet, he said.
Reports of falling debris reached a crescendo in Nacogdoches, where Eirial Stansell was working at his hair salon.
"We were in the office doing payroll for the day," he said, "and all of a sudden this rumbling started. It was like an earthquake. I looked up at the clock, and the building shook for 45 seconds."
Now there's a 4- to 5-foot piece of debris in the parking lot behind the salon.
Being awakened
Kim Hedtke, a student at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, said the explosion woke her up.
"It sounded like thunder at first, but then it just kept getting louder and then the walls started shaking," she said. "And I really didn't know what was going on. My first thought was, this was an earthquake, but, you know, this is Texas."
Nacogdoches resident Jim Garrett said he felt a prolonged tremor shortly after 8 a.m. while reading the newspaper.
"This old, two-story farmhouse, it rattled and rolled," said Mr. Garrett, 50, a lawyer. "My first response was, 'Dang, that jet is flying low.' And then the intensity slackened, but it continued for what seemed like a long time - a lot longer than you'd feel a jet passing over."
For Susan Rushing, who lives in a one-story frame house north of Nacogdoches, the explosion "felt like the washing machine was on spin, and off-balance, for a long time - but a lot louder."
Her daughter Katie, 11, and six other girls were sleeping over for a slumber party. They were jolted from bed. "The house started shaking, and there was this loud rumble," said Ms. Rushing, 50.
"The windows rattled, the glassware clinked, the cabinets slammed and the lamps swayed," she said.
"It lasted for about a minute and a half. One of the girls and I ran out and tried to see what was happening. It was like the longest sonic boom I've heard. But you just didn't know what.
"And then when you later found out, it was just so sad."
Staff writers Teresa Gubbins, Linda Stewart Ball, Jennifer Emily and Robert Garrett contributed to this report.
Father & sons are duck hunting near Texarkana, AR when they saw the trail shooting across the southern horizon. A friend says, "What is THAT?!" Aerospace nerd Father answers, "The shuttle. No, wait, that can't be the shuttle; shuttles don't break apart like that. It must be a meteor." The next generation techno-nerd son insists, "It WAS the shuttle, Dad!" Unfortunately for the families, loved ones, NASA & the Father's ego, he is, of course, right.
An acquaintance saw debris raining down near the Hemphill, TX/Lake Toledo Bend area (human remains were found here) & "yes, he did realize what he was seeing".
Thanks, FRiend. This picture was the headline in the Dallas Morning News Sunday. It took up most of the top half of the front page:
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