Podcast and Slideshow — Rebuilding Greensburg: Four Years of Progress

Greensburg, Kansas, Mayor Bob Dixson, and Stephen Hardy, senior planner with BNIM Architects in Kansas City, who prepared Greensburg’s Sustainable Comprehensive Plan following the May 2007 tornado that devastated the community, talk with Jim Schwab about the city’s four-year-old efforts to rebuild the community on green principles.

Click on the player below to listen:

The Greening of Greensburg

Posted: 11/21/11 01:31 PM ET, Vicky Collins, Huffington Post
Very early in the morning on May 5, 2007 I got a call from NBC News to hurry from Denver to Greensburg, Kansas. There had been a huge tornado and the town was devastated. Go! Go! When I pulled into the town six hours later I was stunned to see wreckage so complete that even the bark had been pulled off the trees. These skeleton sentinals stood over a community of people who were lost and dazed. The EF-5 tornado had 205 mile per hour sustained winds. Almost the entire town was in ruins. It was apocalyptic.
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Almost five years later I returned to Greensburg, and what I saw was as stunning as that first post-disaster morning. The town is cleaned up and there are beautiful new buildings. The school, the hospital, City Hall and the John Deere dealership are all built back to the highest environmental standard called LEED Platinum. There is a pretty little Main Street with shops and even a business incubator sponsored by Sun Chips. People are living in new eco-friendly homes and are saving up to 2/3 on their utility bills. And there are wind turbines everywhere powering the community. Imagine using the same wind that destroyed you to help resurrect yourself!

Remainder of article...

Kansas Town Builds A Clean Energy Field of Dreams

School superintendent Darin Headrick remembers the day the massive 200 mile-an-hour tornado struck his small Kansas community four years ago. His school—along with 95 percent of the town—was blown into a Hiroshima-like pile of rubble by the monster twister. Fortunately the school wasn’t in session at the time, although 11 people lost their lives in the small town. But he wondered what kind of future lay ahead for his students?
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Recently, Darin’s been in touch with the tornado ravaged communities of Tuscaloosa, AL, and Joplin, MO. School officials and business leaders there are eager to learn about the amazing recovery efforts in Greensburg. But Darin says what makes him feel especially good is that local school enrollment is continuing to climb as families are eager to send their kids to a school built with the latest high-tech energy-efficient design.

It’s all part of an amazing green tech revolution that’s sprung up in America’s heartland. The people of Greensburg are proud to be small-town energy-efficient pioneers, building a sustainable future for the world to admire and emulate. After all, the people of Greensburg built their American dream out of the desolate grasslands of the prairie. Building a new clean energy community in the corn and wheat fields of Kansas is not all that different.

Build it and they will come, folks here say. And with each passing day, they are.

more...

Leaders from tornado-hit towns getting lessons from Greensburg

June 29th, 2011 | GREENSBURG, Kansas (KSN) – A FEMA-sponsored workshop brought together city leaders from communities in five states to Greensburg to compare notes on tornado recovery after one of the most active tornado seasons on record.

“This conference is giving us a chance to not only view the devastation that has transpired here in Greensburg but in four short years how they have come back,” said Gary Box with the Joplin Chamber of Commerce...

Hospital head imparts advice to Tuscaloosa visitors

Before taking her Reading and Tuscaloosa guests on a tour of her new $19 million hospital, Kiowa County Memorial Hospital Administrator Mary Sweet gave a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the tornadic destruction of her former facility while imparting lessons learned from her rebuilding experience.

   Sweet began by recalling the practicality that can only be learned by on-scene observation. ...

Funding sources are multiple…

   Asked by Tuscaloosa’s Director of Planning, John McConnell, as to where the rest of the rebuilding funding came from, and whether design needs to take a back seat to functionality, Sweet responded that “going for LEED Platinum” increased the cost estimate by “about $800,000 which isn’t bad as a percentage of $19 million.”

    Sweet went on to say, “We used insurance proceeds, help from FEMA and the State (Dept of Emergency Management) and donations but were still about $4.2 million short.”

She went on to say that remaining gap was met by a “50/50 funding from USDA (Rural Development) in that half was a grant and the other half a loan.”

Other lessons learned…

   Sweet imparted several other tips for her Alabama visitors, such as:

>Don’t agree to arrangements with open-ended financial details…Sweet spoke of the being told a “tent hospital” was available to her shortly after the storm for $2.5 million.  “I told the State we didn’t have that kind of money and they said, ‘Just take it and we’ll figure it out later,’” Sweet said.  “Don’t make that mistake by being in too big a rush to get something in place.  We had to go to modular units because you can’t control temp and humidity in a tent very well, so we couldn’t even run a lab there.”

Read full article...

Searching for answers and feedback- Smithville and 3 Other Communities to Visit Greensburg, Kansas

SMITHVILLE, Miss. (WTVA) — The mayors of three communities reeling from powerful tornadoes have received an invitation to tour a town in Kansas.

FEMA extended an offer to them so they can explore and learn how a town in the Midwest made its way back to a more prosperous lifestyle.

Smithville Mayor Gregg Kennedy is one of three mayors invited by FEMA to take a trip to Greensburg, Kan., on June 28 to see how that town has made a successful recovery from an EF-5 tornado.

"We're travelling up there with a FEMA crew just to look and see how they rebuilt," Kennedy said.  "(We can see) how they do it and get some ideas, a blueprint, of how they went about rebuilding and restructuring their town."

(Reuters) - When community leaders in tornado-ravaged places such as Joplin, Mo., consider the future, they look to Greensburg, Kansas.

Destroyed by a powerful tornado on May 4, 2007, Greensburg is renowned for its rebirth as a community of sustainable living. The town has energy-saving buildings and landscaping at every turn, drawing curious public officials and tourists from around the world.

"Greensburg is certainly a great story," said Steve Castaner, a long-term recovery manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It's a laboratory for how you can take advantage of opportunities to reinvent yourself."

Next week [on June 29th], FEMA will host a "sustainable communities workshop" in Greensburg, attended by people from Joplin and two southeast U.S. communities recently damaged by tornadoes. They will learn how to follow Greensburg's example. ...

...The visit by officials from Joplin and the communities of Smithville, Miss. and Cordova, Ala., comes on the heels of an earlier visit by a delegation from Tuscaloosa, Ala., heavily damaged by a recent tornado.

Greensburg City Councilwoman Erica Goodman said Greensburg is ready with a message of hope for other communities.

"We can't tell you want to do," Goodman said. "We can only tell you what we have done and hopefully you can take that home and start your recovery.

Read More...

Other Greensburg news and info

"Energy Now" June episode featuring Greensburg story

30 minute episode

Tuscaloosa group visits Kan. town that rebuilt after tornado

June 12th

Nearly 1,000 miles and several states separate Tuscaloosa and Greensburg. Only 850 people live in the tiny city situated close to the geographic center of the United States. A 10-member delegation from Tuscaloosa’s Rebuild Tuscaloosa task force visited Greensburg last week, initially worried that they wouldn’t learn anything useful because the cities are so dissimilar.

“It turns out we learned a whole lot,” said City Councilman Bob Lundell.

The 20,000-square-foot Kiowa County Commons is a LEED platinum status building in Greensburg, Kan., that houses the Greensburg branch of the Kiowa County Library, the County Historical Museum, the Kiowa County Media Center and offices of Kansas State Research and Extension. The building was constructed after a 2007 tornado destroyed most of the town’s structures.

Tuscaloosa BOE member sees need for partnership with City

  Unlike Greensburg, Tuscaloosa didn’t lose all its school building in its recent tornado experience, simply because it had over a dozen campuses rather than two buildings.  It did, however, suffer the loss of two campuses, and those in perhaps the poorest part of a town with a relatively high poverty rate.

...    She later told The Signal she learned a great deal from USD 422 Superintendent Darin Headrick, particularly in terms of how he and his board prioritized its rebuilding plans and went about finding the dollars needed from a variety of sources....

Greensburg Recovery Info Blog Site

News and Resources for Greensburgs Long Term Community Recovery Progress

Greensburg Kansas Still Recovering from 2007 Tornado

Greensburg, Kansas, 90% destroyed in an F-5 tornado in May 2007, continues its effort to recover and reinvent itself as a sustainable community.   http://www.greensburgks.org/

The town continues to get recognition for its heroic recovery efforts.  There was the Discovery Channel's Planet Green multi-year series on Greensburg, ongoing news coverage of recovery effort and recently an article from the Earthtechling.com "green tech" blog From Devastation To LEED: A Small Town Story

Here is a link to see the early Long Term Community Recovery Plan that helped to launch this long term recovery process.