NASA: piece of front landing gear found

LUFKIN, Texas, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- NASA confirmed Wednesday that a "significant portion" of the front landing gear of space shuttle Columbia was found along the shore of Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas-Louisiana state line.

NASA spokesman Steve Bowen told reporters a local resident spotted the wreckage Tuesday and flagged down divers searching the lake nearby. He said it was partially buried and about 8-feet tall when held upright.

"It was a significant portion," the NASA official said. "It weighed enough that they had a hard time getting it out and they had to put it on a truck by itself."

The landing gear was one of the larger pieces of debris found so far in the 240-mile-long search area from the Dallas-Fort Worth area southeast to the Texas-Louisiana state line. It will be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center for examination.

Thousands of pieces of debris have been recovered in the search area since Columbia broke apart Feb. 1 over Texas, killing seven astronauts. The largest concentration of wreckage has been found in east Texas and western Louisiana.

About 1,800 state, federal and local searchers continue to scour the forests for debris and seven dive teams are using side-scan sonar to check for wreckage in an 8-square-mile area at the southern end of the Toledo Bend Reservoir.

Capt. Jim Wilkins, the supervisor of the U.S. Navy salvage and diving team, said they are encountering very difficult search conditions because the bottom is littered with standing trees and buildings covered by water when the reservoir was built years ago.

Side-scan sonar is normally towed along the bottom to detect man-made objects but there are too many obstructions on the bottom of Toledo Bend. As a result, the device is only dropped a few feet below the surface, making detection difficult, he explained.

"This is one of the most acoustically challenging environments that you can engineer," Wilkins said. "You take a whole forest, flooded with water, with all the other structures, and then try and search for small objects ... It doesn't get any more difficult."

When divers are sent into the water, sometimes up to 70 feet deep, they have to fight visibility that is less than two or three feet. They also have to be careful that they don't get entangled in the standing trees and stumps that have already wrecked one sonar.

Although fishermen reported a large piece of debris splashing into the reservoir Feb. 1 about the time Columbia tore apart, divers have only found one piece of shuttle debris, a brake assembly section from a landing gear, Bowen said.

In a related development, Texas animal health officials said Wednesday the ailments that three cows and some pen-raised deer came down with near shuttle debris in east Texas were not related to the wreckage. Two of the cows died later.

More than 600 pieces of shuttle debris was found in Cherokee County where the animals became ill. The animals developed swelling in their necks, prompting an investigation by the Texas Animal Health Commission and NASA.

"Autopsies on the two dead cows were suggestive of pneumonia, with bacterial complications. A third cow is recovering," said Dr. James Lenarduzzi, acting executive director for the commission. "The two deer recovered fully after being administered anti-inflammatory drugs. The deer may have sustained an injury when they were startled by the noise of the shuttle breakup, or when shuttle material fell into their pen."

(Reported by Phil Magers in Dallas)