Lessons from Greensburg, Kansas

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Greensburg, Kansas
 / 37.604316; -99.293488

• 37°36′16″N 99°17′37″W / 37.604316°N 99.293488°W
• County Seat, zip code 67054, area 1.5 sq mi (3.9 sq km)
• 2000 US Census: population 1574, 730 households, 453 families, per capita income $18,054
• buildings: city hall, hospital, museum, county schools, fire hall, Twilight Theatre, drug store, John Deere dealership, and all the other businesses and institutions one would imagine in a small Kansas community
• not really a tourist destination (home of the deepest hand excavated water well and a 1000 pound meteorite that landed in a shower some 10,000 or 20,000 years ago)
•  not an economic powerhouse
•  just a nice place to live

At 9:45 PM, May 4, 2007 an EF5 tornado, estimated to be 1.7 miles (2.7 km) wide with winds up to 205 mph (330 kph) erased Greensburg, Kansas. Of the 5%  left standing the only operational buildings were the liquor store and the golf club house.

To avoid becoming maudlin, aside from these two links: a photo essay and a video of a helicopter fly-over, this discussion isn’t intended to be a tribute to heroism, nature’s supremacy or the nobility of man’s survival instincts. If you want to get a better sense of the events you can do your own search on google or youtube.

The process of re-building from disaster at a time of potential global environmental and geo-political crisis and eventually during a time of economic collapse does have many lessons that can be applied to our own real world problems. To get a good description of the geo-political reality being faced by the ‘developed world’ read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded. The latter explains why, for more than one end-game reason, there is a need to be free of the petroleum driven economy.

At the CEFPI mid-year conference in Washington DC, December 2010, Darin Headrick, Superintendent of Kiowa County Schools gave a firsthand account of the re-building experience. Being a school superintendent, his first duties were to ensure the continuation of the school in the life of the community:

• How do you put closure to the school year, especially for the graduating year?
• How do you accommodate students in September 2007, considering no one lived in the town?
• When and how do you begin the reconstruction of the new facility?

Within Greensburg there was a more fundamental discussion happening:

• With no physical history evident who are we?
• Do we re-build exactly what was there?
• Do we create something better?

The discussions and decision making process benefited from the reality that everyone was in the same circumstances:

•  no one had anything to protect at the expense of others,
• everyone was rebuilding personal and economic lives,
• mostly everyone was living in a FEMA trailer, and
• everyone was trying to decide – do I stay or leave?

Re-building the community was essential. Greensburg was once a small centre of commerce and government . Greensburg was not prepared to disappear from the landscape. The most important decision made by the community was to re-create something that was better than what was lost. In probably what is one of the most enlightened and brave decisions a community can make Greensburg, Kansas chose to re-build as a ‘green town’. On December 17, 2007:

Mr. Hewitt (City Administrator) presented resolution #2007-17 that would make it a policy for City projects to be built to LEED® Platinum standards. This sets that standard of building long term, strong facilities. Councilman Hosheit moved to approve Resolution #2007-17, Mitchum seconded. Motion approved 5-0. Mr. Hewitt said that this is unprecedented and that we are the first city in the United States to pass such a resolution.
(Municipal record of meeting minutes) 

They have established Greensburg GreenTown, a non-profit organization, to implement the green living initiative. Peripheral to the LEED® mandated standard, the community installed ten 1.25mw wind turbines to produce all its own power needs. They are effectively off-grid - except that they can sell back to the grid. They also took the opportunity of a leveled landscape to re-plan the town. Several uses, including the schools were relocated to suit the ultimate plan.

Now back to the school. Yes students graduated. Yes there was an emergency portable school ready for September 2007 to accommodate the 73% of the former school population that returned. Yes they re-built the school to accommodate 340 K-12 students in 130,000sf. As a school community they decided to re-build what was most critical and intensely utilized and to depend on other community resources for facilities required intermittently – so the re-built theatre is also the school auditorium. The school is LEED® platinum, with 96 geothermal wells, a 50kw wind turbine, storm water cisterns for irrigation water and built with 86% recycled wood. The school has also been built to accommodate teaching in the digital world.

The biggest challenge, as with any political organization, was getting decisions from the School Board, an assembly of individuals each believing their opinion is the right one. Collectively, their first step was to establish foundational priorities, in order of importance: students, teachers, parents, community, to shape their decision making.

The ribbon cutting for the new school was August 16, 2010.

The hospital, city hall, fire hall, performing arts centre and John Deere dealership have all been rebuilt as LEED® platinum.

What are the lessons from the Greensburg experience? Darin Headrick stated two lessons:

• When you lose everything it isn’t the ‘stuff’ of life you miss, it is the community.
• You will encounter two kinds of people in your life: those who add smiles, others who consume life forces – it is important to commune with the former and recognize and minimize the latter.

Other lessons as they apply to our reality:

•  As we face a world of disruptive innovation, where all our reference points are disappearing and change is happening at the pace of a blur you have to be able to recognize what is foundational and what is transitory or superfluous.
• It is important to define common ground and establish priorities to facilitate objective evaluation. Political game playing is just another version of autocracy where maximizing the benefit for power brokers is the goal.
•  Community is more important than the individual (not to promote socialism, our ‘democratic’ market economy also supports this).
• When the questions comes to: Do I stay or leave? Will I survive or perish?, the real important issues become obvious.

Epilogue

Because of its green initiatives, Greensburg, Kansas is now a leader and a significant destination on the map.

LEED® Rating System is copyright to the U.S. Green Building Council, Inc.(USA). 

Click here for Canadian information (CaGBC).