The total devastation to one third of Joplin, Mo., and most of tiny Reading, Kan., this weekend had many people thinking of another community around here to suffer such complete calamity.
That would be Greensburg, Kan., which four years ago this month took a direct hit from one of the most powerful tornadoes ever recorded. Many people consider it a miracle that 11 people out of 1,200 in the tornado’s path were killed, but that terrible night a couple of things went Greensburg’s way. Whereas the Joplin storm seemed to rise up unexpectedly — meteorologist Mike Smith of AccuWeather told me on Monday that the profile of the tornado turned dramatically more violent four minutes before it struck town — everyone saw the Greensburg storm coming and residents had ample warning. Smith, in fact, has written a history of tornado warnings, and he considers Greensburg the crowning achievement of the system of radar, spotters and emergency notification that was developed in the half century since Udall, Kan., was blindsided by a very similar rain-wrapped night tornado.With the center of the storm moving slowly down Main Street and measuring about 1.7 miles wide, the Greensburg tornado chewed up more than 90 percent of the buildings in town, leaving just a few unharmed buildings on the east side. Six well-built homes were damaged so badly that the engineers brought in to rate the storm a few days later using the new Enhanced Fujita scale declared the Greensburg tornado to be an EF-5. It was the first such extreme storm since a F5 hit Oklahoma City eight years earlier.Of course, Joplin — a town of 50,000 that lost one-third of its buildings, including a regional medical center and its schools — is facing a rebuilding effort on a much larger scale than Greensburg, which I’ve had the privilege to observe up close through more than two dozen trips over the past three years.But Joplin also has some things going for it that Greensburg doesn’t, starting with those thousands of neighbors whose homes were not destroyed in Sunday’s storm.So let’s see where Joplin (and Reading) could learn from Greensburg. I’ll also point out where Greensburg — which rebuilt amazingly well and is now the “greenest town in America” — could stand to learn a lesson from Joplin.Clear out the clutter — now. Some communities have struggled to move the debris after a storm, and this has delayed their recovery efforts by weeks, even months. By contrast, the engineer team brought in just a few days after the Greensburg storm stated in their report that they hadn’t been able to assess the damage to all homes because some owners had already hauled their remains away. That’s the kind of giddy-up you need, FEMA officials I’ve interviewed say, if a community is to come back strong following a disaster.This shouldn’t be a problem in Joplin, where lots of people are ready to help. Hopefully the folks in Reading, who will likely be in shock for months, can get help hauling away the debris.Have public meetings — lots of ’em. One thing that’s clearly changed in Greensburg is the whole approach to public meetings. There are more of them and more people seem to attend since the storm. That’s probably because, in the months following the tornado, FEMA and local stakeholders held a bunch of meetings to plan the town’s recovery. At the first one I attended in February 2008, more than 200 people showed up, many of them from nearby FEMAville.It was in these meetings that residents discussed and ultimately ratified — together — the bold decision to “go green.” It is Greensburg city code today that any public building constructed in city limits must be built to LEED Platinum specifications. And many locals spent a little extra to build their homes back with features that went well beyond the energy savings of a standard new housing unit.A new organization, Greensburg GreenTown, was a facilitator in this process. It held several workshops so folks rebuilding their homes could learn about all the new ways to build in efficiency, like geothermal piping and concrete-filled foam wall blocks. The National Renewal Energy Laboratory was on hand to give advice as well, and the Kansas City architecture firm BNIM held “charrettes” to gain public buy-in on the New Urbanist “green” master plan, which included a host of new zoning codes that did not always go down easy with all residents of Greensburg.Get together and commit to change. One of the quiet players in the rebuilding of Greensburg has been Public Square Communities, an organization that has helped dozens of Kansas and Missouri communities hold “positive conversations” about their future.In America, the groups in any community — business folks, educators, human-service providers and government — often don’t speak to each other. This is especially crippling to rural towns where one person’s contribution can make a huge impact on community life.Greensburg has shown that a community that pulls together and pursues its agenda aggressively will continue to draw in resources from outside much longer than experts had previously thought. I was told in 2009 that the world stops paying attention to a community 18 months after a disaster. Now, four years post-storm, Greensburg is still getting groups of volunteers visiting to help out. (And yes, the town still needs help.)Terry Woodbury is a native of western Kansas who played a role in the rebooting of Wyandotte County in the 1990s before founding Public Square. He prefers a “bottom-up” approach, where Public Square is asked into the community to facilitate change. In Greensburg, though, with everyone so focused on basic things like finding someplace to live until their homes were rebuilt, the Public Square process was imposed from the top down. Yet it worked out, mostly because the portion of Greensburg that had decided to stay and rebuild was highly motivated.Woodbury has told me again and again that he doesn’t tell people anything. He has no agenda — in Greensburg he was even careful not to be “pro-green” — other than getting the disparate groups in town together to plan the future. If folks in central Joplin, or Reading, weren’t meeting regularly to talk about the future, they need to now.Build on the best of what remains. Greensburg residents have always treasured their Big Well — the “world’s largest hand-dug well,” still an engineering wonder 125 years after it was dug for a thirsty frontier town. Deciding how to rebuild the Big Well Museum and feature the tourist attraction (officially it’s one of the “8 Wonders of Kansas”) has consumed a lot of time in Greensburg. It’s been difficult. BNIM, which helped build the amazing Kiowa County Schools building and City Hall, essentially had the contract taken away from them. But the town fully owns the Big Well process now, and that will ultimately produce a result everyone can get behind.Learn how others did it. Ever since it began its recovery, Greensburg has been host to a steady stream of visitors eager to see how a fading rural community turned itself around. Greensburg residents like Mayor Bob Dixson, former mayor John Janssen, Greentown leader Daniel Wallach and the remarkable Bob Mosier are asked to speak around Kansas and around the world about the town’s recovery.Clearly, communities seeking to rebuild can learn by studying the best practices of those that have gone before. Yes, Greensburg will always be unique as a pioneering “green community,” but as I’ve tried to show here, the key to its recovery was about something deeper: people using the disaster as a chance to rethink what it means to live in community and then chasing that vision as hard as they’ve chased anything in life.Oh, and that thing Greensburg could learn from Joplin? I learned about this from Pastor T.J. Lawson of the First Christian Church in Greensburg. Lawson went to seminary in Joplin and there discovered the most amazing farmers market in neighboring Webb City — “the best one I’ve ever been to,” he says. (It’s open today.)Joplin residents are lucky to be living in a state with more small farms than just about anyplace in the country. Locally raised food will survive an energy crisis. And it tastes fantastic. The “greening of Greensburg” hasn’t yet included the rethinking of its local food economy around growers who can bring fresh, delicious produce to the Dillon’s and Green Bean and lunches at the school and for the patients and staff at the stunning new Kiowa County Memorial Hospital. I’d love to see that come to Greensburg. But ultimately that will have to be the decision by people there to include in their green economy. And that’s the way it should be.Read more Aaron Barnhart
Posted on Tue, May. 24, 2011 09:40 AM
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What Joplin can learn from Greensburg (and vice versa)
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