Postcard: Greensburg

The Tornado that hit Greensburg on May 4 took its time, rolling up Main Street like it was on a Sunday stroll to church. Ron Shank, owner of the Kansas town’s General Motors dealership, hid with his wife beneath a quilt in their basement, but they heard the storm rip their home from its foundations. Marvin George, a pastor at the Baptist church, took shelter in his closet. “We just knelt and prayed,” he says. “I wasn’t scared until the next morning, when I saw the carnage.”

The tornado measured 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest possible rating, and it left hardly a single wall standing. “Big strong men looked at what was left and were damn near in tears,” remembers Lonnie McCollum, then the town’s mayor. More than 1,000 people–at least two-thirds of Greensburg’s population–were left homeless. Despite the help that poured in during the following weeks, residents feared that their town had suffered a deathblow. Greensburg’s population had been declining for years. Jobs had grown scarce, and few in the shrinking high school classes stayed after graduation. “We were barely making it before the tornado,” says Wylan Fleener, whose century-old furniture store was reduced to a pile of bricks by the storm. Why rebuild a dying town?

Others saw in the devastation a blank slate on which Greensburg could build back better by building back greener–with energy-efficient homes and offices powered by Kansas’ abundant wind and biofuel resources. The community could become a mecca for environmentalists, drawing green businesses and new jobs. Daniel Wallach, an entrepreneur from a nearby town, formed the nonprofit Greensburg GreenTown shortly after the tornado to promote this transformation. “It could be a living laboratory,” he says, “to demonstrate to the rest of the country and the world what a town of the future could look like.”

Greensburg residents were understandably skeptical. Many were still living in the clusters of trailers nicknamed FEMA-villes, and they were more concerned with getting any kind of roof over their heads than with the quality of its insulation. “There was resistance to change,” says Gene West, the county commissioner. “This is a rural area and a conservative one.”

Wallach and his allies began to shift local opinion by showing that going green wasn’t just about saving the polar bears but also cutting waste and saving on rising fuel bills and building a stronger, more resilient town. Those arguments made sense even to Greensburg’s old-timers. “Our church sometimes costs up to $1,000 a month to heat,” says George, who plans to reconstruct the building to meet the highest energy-efficiency standards. “Now, I’m not a tree hugger by any means,” he says. “But we have to be prepared for a future in which energy costs are only going up.”

Today Greensburg is living up to its name. Consultants from the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are helping residents build new houses that are up to 50% more energy efficient than their old ones. In early January, the city council approved a plan that would make all public buildings in Greensburg conform to the platinum rating of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) standards–something no American town has ever tried. Ron Shank’s car dealership will be rebuilt as a model green facility for GM.

Still, for some, Greensburg–green or not–will never heal. Former mayor McCollum, one of the first to raise the idea of building green, quit his post a few weeks after the tornado, citing exhaustion, and eventually moved with his wife to the neighboring town of Pratt. On a recent Friday, McCollum, 62, spoke wistfully of the town in which he had lived his entire life. He can’t let Greensburg go, but he can’t return either. “For me, it’s completely gone,” he says. “There’s nothing out there for me but heartache.”

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