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Greensburg residents and officials meet with Kansas Health Foundation board and staff members at the 5.4.7 Arts Center in Greensburg.
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After a devastating tornado destroyed 95 percent of Greensburg in May 2007, this small Kansas town realized it had a choice: Change or die.
Greensburg chose to change, but people there agree that their town is far from the only community in the state facing a life-or-death situation. In a candid panel discussion recently with the Kansas Health Foundation board, many Greensburg residents said rural communities across the state need a wake-up call.
“After the tornado, whether you liked it or not, change was here, and that gave new people a chance to come to the forefront and lead,” said Gene West, chairman of the Kiowa County Commission. “Whether other rural Kansas towns know it or not, they’ve had a tornado. We have communities all over the state that are just trying to hold things together, and that’s not going to work.”
The town a tornado blew apart isn’t being rebuilt into the same place it was before. Instead, local residents decided to put Greensburg on the national map by becoming a “green” town. The City Council made Greensburg the first city in the United States to pass a resolution that all city buildings would be constructed to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum standards. The world watched Greensburg’s tragedy, and more than two years later, it’s watching the town reach for triumph.
“If things don’t change, no one changes,” said Bob Wetmore of Kiowa County Development Corp. “When I came to Greensburg after the tornado, I kept asking people, ‘Do you have this? Do you have that?’ and they finally said to me, ‘Bob, it all blew away.’ The reason they think outside of the box is that the box blew away. There is no box here. I’ve not been to another Kansas community that gets it because they’re safe and sound and things are exactly the way they’ve always been. (What Greensburg is doing is) totally foreign to other small towns because they haven’t been through anything like this.”
Some people who don’t live near Greensburg were surprised that the town would even want to rebuild after the tornado, said Kent Stehlik, Kiowa County Resource Coordinator. “What other choice do you have?” Stehlik said. “Either you walk away or you deal with what happened. It’s not hopeless. You can do it. Put the talk into action.”
The federal government made changes along with Greensburg as a result of the tornado, Stehlik said.
“It isn’t just a change that happened in Greensburg,” he said. “USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) changed some of their rules when they saw things that were working in Greensburg that had never happened before. It might be easier the next time a community goes through a tornado or an earthquake with the changes USDA and FEMA have made because of Greensburg.”
The beginning of Greensburg’s rebirth was a huge challenge. The people who stayed had to figure out how to be open with each other, compromise and work together for the common good.
“It didn’t start with goals and visions, it started with unity,” said Kim Gamble, co-convenor of Greensburg’s Public Square Steering Committee. “We still don’t all have the same goals, but we all have the same love for this community and we want it to be a great place for our children and grandchildren to live. We all had to learn that not one of us is going to get everything that we want.”
At a number of meetings, the town split into small discussion groups that each contained people with a wide range of ages and backgrounds. The meetings included sticky notes that gave everyone in town the opportunity to have a voice in the decision-making even if they didn’t want to speak in public. “People who would never speak at a public meeting still had the opportunity to write what they felt and what they wanted on a sticky note and put it up on the board and somebody on the leadership team would read it,” Gamble said. “They didn’t have to sign their names or anything.”
When the community began to discuss what Main Street should look like, there was conflict and confrontation because people wanted different things and some ideas clashed. “But if you don’t give people a way to buy into this process, apathy will set in,” said Ruth Ann Wedel, who works for Greensburg Greentown. “Then people won’t come to the meetings anymore. They won’t participate, they’ll just complain.” And when complaints and gossip take root in a struggling town, progress gets stopped in its tracks.
Terry Woodbury, who moderated this Greensburg panel discussion, said that the Kansas Health Foundation helped Greensburg substantially soon after the tornado by providing some financial support for a town meeting as well as 28 small-group facilitators who had all received leadership training through the Foundation’s Kansas Community Leadership Initiative. “That was a major contribution that you all made,” Woodbury told the Foundation’s board.
These open meetings helped some Greensburg teenagers feel like they were included and that they had a voice in the community for the first time.
“Some of the young people became interested in the community after the tornado because now there were new things that they could get excited about,” Stehlik said. “Before, many of the kids would talk about going to college and then winding up in Denver or Kansas City. Now they felt they had a part to play here and they were genuinely interested in coming back after college to help their hometown.”
The process of change hasn’t been easy, and it requires a deep commitment, West said.
“If you don’t make the commitment and if you aren’t willing to work for your grandchildren, it’s not going to happen,” West said. “My grandkids are fifth-generation in this town, and I want their grandkids to have the opportunity for the same kind of life I’ve had here.”
The tornado forced Greensburg to change quickly, and even though other Kansas towns are in danger of dying, their changes are likely to happen more slowly, Greensburg residents said.
“Here, the crisis happened to everyone at once,” Gamble said. “We didn’t have just one or two people understanding the problems and trying to get other people to see the light. Here, it flashed brightly for everybody at the same time.”
While they are making impressive progress in rebuilding their town, people in Greensburg are still coping with the high level of stress that the storm left behind.
For many of the tornado survivors, their blood pressure numbers are higher. Their cholesterol levels are rising. They’re having more trouble sleeping. People are snippier with each other.
“I haven’t seen so much that people are sick, they’re just not well,” said Mitzi Hesser, Kiowa County Director of Public Health. “We lost memories, we lost friendships because people moved away, we lost our past, we lost that sense of security, we even have a loss of seasons because we don’t have many trees or spring flowers and most of our lawns don’t have grass yet. We’ve lost some years off our lives. We’re noticing we’re more tired and more stressed.”
After Hesser met with area ministers recently, they agreed that “we have a good 25 percent of our community that are still stuck on May 4, 2007. They haven’t been able to pick up and get back to a quality of life,” she said.
And yet, people in Greensburg aren’t forgetting the kindnesses that came along after their catastrophe. “We’ve been blessed with people coming forward,” Greensburg resident Bob Mosier said. “We knew we were dying. We had very little left on Main Street and we’ve been blessed many, many times over with financial donations and the 100,000 volunteers who have come to help with the cleanup and rebuilding.”
Greensburg residents say they’re searching for ways to pay that kindness forward. They want other Kansas towns to benefit from their experience.
“People in this community had strong foundations before the tornado,” said Mike Estes of BTI Greensburg. “The tornado tore down the (emotional) walls we had built for ourselves that kept us from each other, and that was a really good thing. There was confrontation, but confrontation can be good. Not having our own walls up anymore is helping us rebuild the town’s walls, and we need to make sure that those emotional walls don’t get rebuilt so that we can keep making progress. We’ve been given a gift in a real sense here. How do we pass on what we’ve learned to other communities?”
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