How I ... got the story
Alum focused on reporting basics to cover shuttle disaster

By Erik Rodriguez
Higher Education Reporter
Austin (Texas) American-Statesman

Posted: Feb. 21, 2003

NACOGDOCHES, Texas -- I was romping through the backwoods in a SUV on this country ranch deep in East Texas, listening to NPR and trying to keep up with two women plowing over mud-caked hills and low-water crossings in a beat up pickup truck.

It was Sunday, the day after the space shuttle Columbia broke apart over the skies here, littering the landscape with thousands of pieces of debris.

Some were scattered here on Phyllis Stone's 160 acres.

They included a long, mangled piece of bolted metal that looked like the runner on the truck I was driving. There was a deep divot in the ground nearby, presumably from where it hit.

"The whole house was just shaking, it was vibrating," Stone said. "I looked out the window and saw the cows were running, the dogs were running and within 10 minutes we saw it all on the news."

My visit with her on that Sunday morning was the first of many I had that week with locals whose lives were interrupted by a national tragedy. Within hours of the shuttle disaster, the national press had descended on tiny Texas towns like Lufkin, Hemphill, Rusk and Nacogdoches, where Stone lives.

I first heard about the disaster from my mother-in-law near Dallas, who heard a loud bang in the sky and then saw Columbia breaking apart live on TV. The re-entry was being broadcast on WFAA-TV.

Within minutes, I was called into the office.

Austin, where I work, is about 250 miles west of where much of the debris landed. For us, it was a major story. Almost every reporter on the metro desk of the Austin American-Statesman worked that Saturday, each with different assignments.

Reporter-photographer teams were dispatched around the state.

I was sent to Nacogdoches County, where much of the debris appeared to be.

We arrived at 3:30 Sunday morning, got a room at nearby Diboll, Texas, and were up and out again by 7:30 a.m. for an early-morning press conference.

The local sheriff's information was tantalizing, but we wanted meatier reports from the federal command post set up in Lufkin.

We abandoned that approach when it was clear NASA and FEMA weren't talking.

Details dribbled in every couple of hours: A fuel cell crash-landed at the Nacogdoches airport. First human remains found in the county. An intact seat, including a seatbelt, found in the piney woods to the east. I'd just scribble down as much as I could at each press conference, and then compile all the details into a quick-hit story for the Web.

The first day, I phoned it all in. By Monday, we had made friends and were able to set up shop in an electrical closet at the local convention and visitors' bureau.

In between press conferences, I wandered around and spoke to people, hoping to find landowners who had wreckage on their property. Those interviews brought floods of color for our stories. We also tried following searchers and recovery teams, which was more hit-and-miss. We tried to get into the airport but were kicked out by national guardsmen.

We visited the makeshift memorial near the town square, where a particularly large chunk of debris had skidded to a stop in a parking lot behind a local bank.

Locals and media both congregated there. Our photographer Brian got a great shot when two little girls, dressed in their Sunday best, played a duet of "Amazing Grace" on violins.

On Sunday, I wrote an insert. But Monday I was the lead writer for our main debris story, one of two stories that led the newspaper. Between press conferences and running around, I took feeds from other reporters in the field and logged into our home system from the electrical closet, scanning the wires for anything we may have missed.

On a hunch, we left early Monday morning for Douglass School, which remained closed because of debris. There were only a few media outlets camped out there. We were rewarded when EPA officials showed up to recover wreckage. Our speculation paid off even more when the federal official in charge answered one reporter's question and the rest of us swarmed him. He answered almost everything we asked, candidly and honestly, providing key details we didn't have before.

East Texas was only one stage where this story unfolded, but it was a popular one. It was a standard media circus, which included CNN and the networks, about a dozen local TV trucks, a gaggle of print reporters and media visitors from Denver, Nashville, Little Rock and other far-flung areas.

The challenge for me was to get as much detail as possible, then condense it immediately into a publishable form. It stripped me back to basics -- what's most important? What's new right now? How much detail can we get, and what's confirmed and what's speculation? I would write the Web stories and then gather string for the main bar, which I would sit down to write about 5 p.m. or later.

I cut it close, but I never busted deadline.

Sometimes, I wrote from the passenger seat of the car, sometimes, that electrical closet, and thankfully on one night, my hotel room.

In my short career, I've been fortunate to be involved with some large breaking news stories -- the 1999 Texas A&M bonfire collapse; the day-trader shootings in downtown Atlanta; Gary Graham's heavily protested Texas execution in 2000.

But this story was the first in which I played a major role in. While I was nervous at first, I settled in quickly because I felt confident about the assignment and there was so much to do.

That's a benefit of working for a medium-market newspaper -- younger reporters can get a chance to shine. I also lucked out by being in the right place at the right time, which happened to be right in front of the metro editor when teams were flooding out of the building.

Sue Kennedy, the county judge in Nacogdoches, made a point to keep reminding the media that it was more than just a story. She would grow agitated with questions about human remains, and she broke into tears more than once at the podium.

I think, for a lot of reporters, when something like this happens, we put the tragedy part of it out of our minds so we can do the job at hand -- to get information and disseminate it quickly. I'm sure many of us saw the next day headlines, "SHUTTLE LOST" and "WE MOURN AGAIN," and we skimmed through pull-out quotes of President Bush paying homage to the Columbia crew.

And each day, we'd go back to our officials and ask about wreckage and human remains.

Then, late Tuesday night, when my shifts were finally done, I said a silent prayer for those astronauts.

Erik Rodriguez was a Summer 1999 Scholar at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Reach him at erik.rodriguez@earthlink.net.

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