OMG.....progressive, leftie values hit small town Kansas. Who knew.
What's next.......a liberal in Pine Bluff, Ark? God forbid!
The Greenest Town in America
by Lamar Graham
published: 04/19/2009
An eco-friendly home in Greensburg, Kansas.
Darin Headrick, superintendent of schools in Greensburg, Kan., wasn’t particularly alarmed to hear a tornado siren wail on the evening of May 4, 2007. Such warnings are rites of spring in south-central Kansas, and when Mother Nature gets her dander up, “there’s nothing much you can do but get home, put the vehicles away, and get down in the basement,” Headrick says. So he and his wife went next door and joined their neighbors, a couple with two teenage daughters, in their below-ground rec room.
Violent wind, rain, and hail lashed the town. The power went out. Suddenly, Headrick says, “ there was a huge pressure change in the atmosphere.” They heard glass begin to shatter above them, then a sound like a giant wrecking ball.
Miraculously, the planks over their heads held fast. The rest of the house simply vanished. So did every other dwelling in the vicinity. For a desperate hour, the two families searched for neighbors. Eventually, they set out on foot for the dark center of town.
Every house and building they passed had been flattened. “We met people coming from the other direction,” Headrick recalls. “They said, ‘It’s not any better back there.’ That’s when we knew.” Greensburg, population 1574, had been wiped off the map.
The tornado that obliterated Greensburg was one of the strongest ever recorded anywhere, with winds of 205 mph and a footprint 1.7 miles wide. The town, only about 1.5 square miles, never stood a chance. Eleven people died. Fewer than a dozen homes were left standing.
The devastation was so complete that folks in Greensburg wondered whether to rebuild at all. Even before the twister, their town had been on the wane, its population graying, its young people moving away. “Rural America is kind of dying,” Headrick observes.
Yet in the days immediately following the disaster, hundreds of Greensburg residents gathered under a circus tent pitched by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on the outskirts of town. There they discovered in themselves an urgent desire for resurrection.
“The only thing we had left was our relationships with one another,” explains Mayor Bob Dixson, a retired postmaster. “So we did everything together. We worshipped together. We ate together.” Shared adversity, he says, drew folks closer.
Quickly, consensus emerged. Some 800 people pledged to return. So did more than 60 businesses. Townspeople also agreed that they couldn’t simply rebuild as before. If there was any silver lining in the funnel cloud, they concluded, it was that Greensburg now had the chance to imagine an entirely new future. Here was an opportunity to attract outsiders, create new jobs, and sustain generations to come.
So together they hatched a plan. They would rebuild Greensburg as the Greenest City in America—the most energy-efficient, environmentally sensitive municipality in the U.S., an oasis on the Great Plains for eco-friendly industries, a sustainable-development laboratory to inspire the nation.
“If we hadn’t consciously decided to rebuild green, we’d have simply rebuilt a dying town,” says Scott Reinecke, who lost his auto-body shop to the twister. “The green push put us in the spotlight.”
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