All week long the two men had been sitting outside of town watching tornadoes form and fall apart. Nothing much had come of any of them. Greg Ellis was the fire chief and Ray Affeldt the assistant fire chief for Coldwater, Kansas, 30 miles north of the Oklahoma line. When twisters started to roll up Tornado Alley, the pair slipped in behind them in Ray’s pickup and reported what they saw to the National Weather Service. Their goal was to get as close as possible to the damage path without getting sucked into it -- creeping within half a mile of a column of air rotating up to 200 miles per hour, and knowing exactly when to back off. People said that an F-3 or an F-4 tornado (on a scale of 1 to 5) couldn’t eat a brick house or a church or school or hospital made of brick, either, but people could be wrong. This evening, the men had their eyes on a small formation, no more than 1/8 of a mile wide, with a couple of tails that were flirting with the ground but not hitting it.
“We figured,” Greg says, in a flat Midwestern drawl, “that it would just rope out and go back up into the sky.”
“Like all the others had that week,” Ray adds. “Fact is, you never know what they’re gonna do.”
Starting his truck, Ray decided to tag along as the twister made its way north up Highway 183, just another routine Friday night in May 2007, in Comanche County, Kansas.
The sun had already set and dusk was settling over the countryside, dotted with power lines, wheat fields, farmhouses, and oil wells. Black clouds were mounting and darkness was coming fast. The wind was picking up and it was harder to see the funnel spinning in front of them, but they were certain of one thing. Every time lightning flashed around the tornado, it looked bigger.
“For a while,” Greg says, “we’d been able to view the whole thing, but by now it must have been half a mile wide.”
As the men moved in closer, the funnel began spitting out more and more debris: hedge trees, oil rigs, telephone poles, fence posts, and barbed wire. Rain had begun falling, then hailstones. Highway 183 was getting slicker, with Ray dodging branches and live electrical lines shooting off sparks.
“Things were startin’ to feel un-comfortable,” he says.
“The storm was turnin’ ugly and we were right in the middle of it,” Greg laughs. “That’s why we get paid the big bucks.”
Because somebody needed to provide the surrounding rural communities with an early warning system that was nearer the action and more accurate than either the National Weather Service or local TV stations, the men did this work on a volunteer basis.
The twister hit a natural gas line and spewed flames into the air. If a bolt of lightning struck the gas, the hills could be set afire.
“I told Ray he had to back off now,” Greg says. “If that gas line blows, our truck was gonna turn bright red and we’d be goin’ a helluva lot faster than before.”
Ray exited 183 and zigzagged behind the tornado on gravel roads, as the twister jumped across the highway and turned right, on course to go in between the two small towns of Mullinville and Greensburg. But it kept turning, hitting an electrical transmission plant and a couple of farms, as lightning kept flashing around it.
“It was way too big to see all of it now,” Greg recalls.
“It was hissin’ real bad,” his partner says. “It was the biggest, meanest, loudest damn thing I’d ever seen. Had to be a mile-and-a-half wide on the ground.”
And it was headed straight for Greensburg. Cell phones had been knocked out by the storm so the men radioed the National Weather Service and the Greensburg police with a frantic warning: a monster funnel cloud was coming right at them. At 9:30 p.m., when the tornado sirens went off inside Greensburg, nearly all of its 1,400 citizens ran down to their own basement or someone else’s. People’s ears were starting to pop from the approaching pressure and their pets were acting strangely. Glass was shaking in the windows above their heads and nails were screeching inside of boards. Rain and hail were slamming rooftops as the night began to howl.
The firemen stopped at a couple of farmhouses to check for injuries before jumping back in the truck and chasing after the tornado, moving northeast at 20 miles per hour. It hit Greensburg at exactly 9:50 because that’s when clocks all over town came to a dead halt. Eight minutes later, the twister had moved on, but the clocks never restarted.
Greg and Ray drove into Greensburg about 10:10 and all the electricity was out. It was pitch black except for the headlights of ambulances and police cars converging on the town from every direction. The two men parked in front of the first house they came to, but most of it was gone. The couple living there had been picked up with their house, blown north, and dropped into a ditch filled with water. As the firemen began searching for victims, they were surrounded by the sounds of people crying out for help, or just crying, or those begging for their lives in the darkness. One woman had fish lures stuck up and down her back. Every time lightning flashed now, it revealed a slice of Greensburg to the men and nothing around them was left standing.
They set about pulling people from the rubble and handing them off to ambulance drivers who took them to the makeshift triage center in the tavern on Main Street, the only unharmed business in town. They worked all night, along with hundreds of others, locating the dead and shipping off the wounded to three regional hospitals. The tornado -- an F-5, the most powerful on the Fujita scale of magnitude and referred to as the “Finger of God” -- had destroyed the local hospital, but it was still too dark to say how much more of Greensburg was gone. At six a.m., the sun came up and the answer was stunning: 95% of the town had disappeared or was damaged beyond repair. Seven churches had vanished, along with the county jail and the entire school system. The courthouse remained standing, but a Pontiac was perched on its roof. The community measured 1.7 miles wide and so had the twister at full force. It had fit perfectly inside the city limits and carried away nearly all of Greensburg -- dropping some open coffins in a muddy field outside of town and other objects a hundred miles away. Along the streets and sidewalks, trees had been stripped not just of their limbs or leaves but also their bark, and they were bleeding sap.
“That morning,” Ray says, “people were walking around carrying bags full of their possessions. They were so dazed they didn’t speak or look at you when you came up and offered them help. They didn’t seem to hear or see anything. It was the eeriest feeling.”
“What I’ll always remember most,” says Greg, “was the sweet smell after the storm. Many of the houses were made of pine and the air smelled like fresh-cut pine boards. Like everything there had been put through a saw mill.”
Miraculously, because of the warnings from the firemen and a handful of others, the town had taken cover and had only ten fatalities. The number was unbelievably low for what, in terms of property damage, was the most destructive tornado in American history.
Sometimes as a journalist, you have to go someplace without knowing why. The twister hit seven days ago and I’ve just driven 430 miles from Denver in the hope that the police barricading the road up ahead will let me into the ravaged town. Earlier in the week, President Bush came to Greensburg to declare it a disaster area. He said you couldn’t fully appreciate what had happened here from photos or TV coverage -- one reason I’d wanted to see it for myself -- but I’m looking for something more than direct visual evidence of the destruction. What I’m after may be inside those blocked-off city limits, but I’ve got to get past the cops first.
An hour earlier, I’d stopped in Dodge City for gas and spotted a newspaper headline saying that Greensburg was holding its first town meeting since the tornado, starting this evening at five p.m. All day long as I’ve driven across eastern Colorado and western Kansas, I’ve been listening to the AM radio broadcasts that saturate this part of the country. They’ve delivered a constant stream of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck talking about red states versus blue states; my values are superiors to yours; and about how Americans are divided by their political or religious beliefs. In 2004, Thomas Frank wrote a book called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” describing how Midwesterners had been duped by rightwing talk show hosts and the neo-conservatives in the Republican Party. The GOP had used racial, religious, and sexual fears, Frank argued, to get the rubes in Kansas and throughout the heartland to vote against their own economic self-interest. The neo-cons had played the faith card as a political weapon to defeat the opposition.
Approaching the policemen, I see rows of naked trees up ahead, bending toward the north, like rider-less horses on the horizon. Their exposed sap is lacing the air with an acrid smell, and the odor evokes death. At ten minutes till five, I reach the cops, who’ve been turning away nearly every vehicle in front of me. Rolling down the window, I show them a business card and the paper I just bought in Dodge City.
“I’m a reporter,” I tell them, “and I’m supposed to cover this town meeting.”
Then I hold my breath, absolutely not wanting to turn around and retrace the 430 miles back home.
The officers exchange glances and one shrugs.
“Go on in,” he says.
“Thank you,” I nod with appreciation and relief, driving slowly into Greensburg.
Roofs are sitting flat on the ground and 18-wheeler trucks lie upside down, like kittens waiting for their bellies to be scratched. Along Main Street, the shelves of several businesses are standing, but the outside walls are missing. A few nights ago, four soldiers from nearby Fort Riley were arrested for looting cigarettes and beer from an open storefront. Police and armed National Guard personnel are everywhere patrolling the streets, strictly enforcing the eight p.m. curfew. The town is mostly silent, except for some crows cawing in the denuded trees that rise above the wasteland. World War II comes to mind, specifically Hiroshima in August 1945. Greensburg has no running water, no food, no banks or money or jobs, no official records or electricity or phones, but a few portable toilets have been planted on street corners. I don’t drive far because the asphalt is covered with bits of glass and twisted nails.
FEMA trailers are parked around the courthouse, with federal employees already taking control of the cleanup and whatever comes next. Following the tornado, the agency leaped into action -- seeing Greensburg as the chance to redeem itself after the Katrina failures in New Orleans. The feds’ presence in town will eventually grow to scores of work trailers and as many as 350 mobile homes for temporary housing for the locals, should the town decide to rebuild and the scattered people choose to return to live here. FEMA will be helped by Mennonite farmers who live outside the town, by Mexican immigrants from across the region, by African-Americans working for the government, and by more than a thousand local volunteers from nearby communities. Over the next two months, FEMA would oversee the removal of nearly 40,000 truckloads of rubble, at a cost of more than $50 million, while scrambling to make up for other governmental shortages.
In late 2005, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius had told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that because her state’s National Guard unit and military equipment were so heavily deployed in Iraq, Kansas wouldn’t be prepared if an emergency struck inside its borders. Rumsfeld ignored her. A month later, in a face-to-face meeting with President Bush, she’d told him the same thing.
“We’re working on it,” he replied, but nothing changed.
The day after the twister leveled Greensburg, Governor Sebelius ordered the Kansas National Guard into the town and delivered some stinging words for the Bush Administration: because Midwestern soldiers and material were occupied in Iraq, they weren’t available to help her people during a crisis.
“I don’t think,” she said, “there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees, and helicopters that the response is going to be slower.”
Tony Snow, the President’s Press Secretary, fired back at Sebelius, blaming her for not asking the administration for enough assistance.
In 2005, “Time Magazine” had named Sebelius, a progressive Democrat, one of nation’s five best governors. Instead of backing down from Snow, she now reiterated her stance on the lack of National Guard personnel. Then she went further, proclaiming that Greensburg should not only come back, but be recreated as “the greenest small town in America” -- coining the slogan “the greening of Greensburg.”
No community in the 21st Century, she pointed out, got the opportunity to start over, until now. She’d work to come up with state dollars for such a project and the federal government had begun looking for ways to implement green ideas. City planners could provide Greensburg with the latest energy-efficient technology and the most advanced environmental infrastructure. The village could become a model for towns not only around the nation, but the world. This would bring in money, attention, and tourists. It could serve an educational purpose at a time when global warming and other “green” issues were becoming important parts of our political and economic dialogue. Instead of giving into the despair caused by the disaster, maybe this was the moment for trying something entirely new.
Sebelius didn’t sound much like the governor of the state Thomas Frank had written about half a decade earlier. And she didn’t sound anything like what Limbaugh and his radio brethren so confidently proclaimed about the people and politicians in rural or conservative states. Another reality -- subtler and more complex than the one portrayed on talk radio -- was emerging in the aftermath of the twister. Things were not exactly black and white, or red and blue. The tornado had ripped the façade off of Greensburg, by blowing away its homes and businesses, and would expose many other things as well.