The town of Greensburg, Kansas is located pretty much smack dab in the middle of America's wheat belt. It's the county seat of Kiowa county and used to have a population of about 1500 people. Greensburg was a charming little farming community with lots of big trees, a drug store with a soda fountain, and a beautiful historic movie theater. The town even had its own kitschy little tourist trap, advertised by signs on the highway: "The World's Largest Hand-Dug Well." The triptych to the right shows what these landmarks looked like a few years ago. In short, Greensburg was a slice of Norman Rockwell Rural Americana that had somehow survived into the 21st century.
But on May 4, 2007, just before 10 pm, the town was essentially wiped off the map when it sustained a direct hit from a 1.7 mile-wide EF5 tornado. Remarkably, only 12 people died, probably thanks to the emergency sirens that sounded 20 minutes before the monstrous wedge funnel hit. But 95% of the town's buildings were either completely demolished or damaged beyond repair. All of those landmarks pictured in the triptych were destroyed. Many houses simply vanished in the 200+ mph winds, their storm cellars and bare, sandblasted foundations the only remaining evidence that they had ever existed. Their ceilings, walls, carpet, plumbing, furniture, clothing, and toys still litter the surrounding farmland for miles. Thankfully, however, most of the families living in those houses survived.
Madlyn Rice was one of the residents of Greensburg who hid from the storm that night and somehow escaped serious injury or death. She actually got off fairly lucky: her home was heavily damaged but intact, and most of her possessions were safe. But the town government decided her property would have to be bulldozed anyway. So a few days later her daughter, Carol, flew out to Kansas to help her salvage what she could and begin a new life in a nearby town. On May 15th, Carol took some photos showing what remained of Greensburg.
I've now finally gotten around to arranging a few of those pictures into a video slideshow. The editing is admittedly amateurish and the image quality is reduced by YouTube's video compression, but I hope it still conveys some sense of the enormity of the destruction and loss. Keep in mind as you watch this that none of the demolished structures you see were mobile homes or shoddy tenements; they were all solidly constructed wood or masonry buildings. And the stubby, splintered, alien-looking things sticking up out of the ground were once large, healthy trees with lots of limbs and leaves.
(Click below to play video)
Efforts to rebuild Greensburg are currently underway, but progress so far has been frustratingly slow. Many of the former residents have now moved far away and have no desire to return to where their lives were violently uprooted and their belongings destroyed.
Here are some more sites with Greensburg photos:
- Before & After Slideshow
- Wichita Eagle Aerials
- Kiowa County Signal Memory Map
- Jon Person's Volunteer Journal
Followup (12/29/2007): NPR's All Things Considered did a story describing the progress so far in rebuilding Greensburg.
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