Green Living

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EDITORIAL
Jim Lenahan jlenahan@usatoday.com Jeanette Barrett-Stokes jbstokes@usatoday.com 22
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Features
Actor Johnny Galecki joins cast of activists
AMERICAS ALL-GREEN TOWN ECO-GENERATION

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Greensburg, Kan., rebuilds after twister

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Aline Barros Julia Rhault Victoria Meyers

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Wal-Mart proof green works

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Joe Bush , Claudia M. Caruana, Chris Colston , Nancy Dunham, Dan Friedell , Deborah R. Huso, , David Macaulay, Nancy Mills, Judith Nemes, Mellisa F. Pheterson, Patrick Quinn, Maridel Reyes, Denise Schipani, Celia Shatzman, Lisa Troshinsky, Matt Villano Odessy Barbu, Ricardo DeAratanha, Jay Calderon, Jaime Green
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Architect Mike Reynolds earthship homes typically are solar-heated and constructed of tires that reccyle water and are off the electric grid. His model (above) in New Mexico looks like something out of Oz.

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ECO INNOVATORS

WELCOME
to Greensburg
BY PATRICK QUINN Photos by Jaime green

NEBRASKA

MISSOURI
Kansas City

From the rubble of a tornado, a Kansas town becomes a model for environmentally friendly living

he small town of Greensburg straddles U.S. Highway 54 in south-central Kansas, laid out in neat square blocks. It is farm country. If you look to your east and west, wheat, soybeans and cattle can be seen for miles. The seat of Kiowa County is about 100 miles west of Wichita. Greensburgs claim to fame once came from being home to the worlds largest hand-dug well. The simply named Big Well is 109 feet deep and more than 30 feet in diameter. Its an impressive structure and, at the beginning of 2007, was the most

unusual aspect of this city of 1,600. But what came next changed the community forever. On May 4, 2007, a tornado swept through Greensburg, essentially destroying the all-American town. The tornado killed 13 people and injured more than 60 others. The twister razed 95 percent of the structures in town, and the remaining five percent were seriously damaged. President George W. Bush and Kathleen Sebelius, then state governor, immediately declared the town a disaster area. More than one Greensburg resident wondered if the storm had flat-out killed the community. We lost half the population [to relocation] right away, recalls Greensburg Mayor Bob Dixson, who was the postmaster at the time. They had no place to live. A lot of older residents moved to neighboring communities. But we were very blessed2.8 million of our friends and neighbors came to help us, he says, referring to the population of Kansas. The Kansas Department of Transportation, the Kansas National Guard, many cities, counties and towns sent trucks and ambu-

COLORADO D

KANSAS
Greensburg
OKLAHOMA
100 MILES

Wichita

>Main Street in Greensburg In this block are sustainable features such as native plantings and a water catchment system used to capture and filter rainwater to be used in irrigation. Below is Kiowa City Commons.

JIM WATSON

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lances and equipment and volunteers. Work to clear the wreckage of the town and care for the surviving residents started immediately. The U.S. Forest Service set up a base camp and served more than 36,000 meals in the four weeks after the tornado. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) installed hundreds of mobile homes that eventually housed about 300 families. Recovery from the wreckage and planning for the future took place amid scenes of almost unimaginable devastation. Throughout the summer, residents held weekly tent meetings to discuss plans. Since the tornado wiped out all communication systems, residents depended on the yellow sheet, a paper printed and distributed twice a week to get the word out about recovery efforts. We had an 86-year-old newsboy distributing the paper, says Ann Dixson, the mayors wife and a municipal judge. At sometimes-stormy public meetings, Greensburgs battered survivors grappled with the complexities of receiving federal disaster aid and the daunting task of adopting a long-term recovery plan. What would the future hold for Greensburg, Kan.? Would the town rebuild, and how? From the swirling aftermath of disaster came something amazing: Americas greenest little town.

>A WORLD LEADING COMMUNITY Clockwise from top left: The 5.4.7 Arts Center is named after the date of the tornado that razed Greensburg. It was designed and built by University of Kansas graduate architecture students in Lawrence and was moved to Greensburg in seven pieces in 2008; Ruth Ann Wedel shows a tornado shelter made from a propane tank and on display at Greensburg GreenTowns Silo Eco-Home. GreenTown, a nonprofit group, educates residents and business owners on how to live sustainably; wind turbines dot the citys landscape; gardeners plant 26 sycamore trees in front of the Kiowa County School; the top floor of the Big Well Museum offers visitors a panoramic view of the city; former Kansas state treasurer Dennis McKinney holds a photo of the tornado devastation on Main Street in 2007.

thinking in innovative ways

Today, six years after the tornado, Greensburg is the worlds leading community in LEED-certified buildings per capita. The town is home to a half-dozen LEED-platinum certified buildings, including the new City Hall and the new 48,500-square-foot Kiowa County Memorial Hospital. Renewable energy powers the entire community, and the streetlights are all LED. Reconstruction is nearly complete. The new LEED-platinum K-12 school is full. The 2010 census counted 777 residents, but Dixson thinks that number is low. Judging by the utility hook-up reports I see at City Hall, I think were at about 850, he says. The idea to go green was floated early on. At the very first tent meeting, held

Whats in a name?
> DID YOU KNOW? The towns curiously prophetic name comes from one of its founders, D.R. Cannonball Green. Cannonball operated a stagecoach line and was Kiowa Countys first representative elected to the Kansas legislature.

a week after the tornado, resident Daniel Wallach proposed rebuilding as a model green community. That summer, he helped found Greensburg GreenTown, a nonprofit organization that became an information clearinghouse for the towns environmentally minded reconstruction. Mayor Dixson concedes that some residents cringed a little bit at all the green talk. For some people it sounded very 1967-1968, you know, powder-blue bell bottoms and tie-dyed shirts. The number one topic at those tent meetings was talking about who we arewhat are our values? he says. There was a lot of hard work, a lot of discussion. Some of it was positive, some of it was less than positive. Sometimes we agreed to disagree, but

we were still civil to each other. And lets not forget that our ancestors were stewards of the land. My ancestors lived in the original green homes: sod houses.

BREAKING GROUND
An environmentally minded Kansas City design firm, BNIM, worked with the town and FEMA to help create a long-term recovery plan. Gradually, the notion to go green gained traction with town residents, and they came to embrace the possibility of turning the town into a living laboratory for sustainable development. Eight months after the tornado, the Greensburg City Council adopted a resolution: All large public buildings in Greensburg with a footprint exceeding 4,000 square feet

must meet the LEED-platinum standards of the U.S. Green Building Council and utilize renewable energy sources. This is groundbreaking stuff, city administrator Steve Hewitt told people at the meeting. One enormous infrastructure change was Greensburgs conversion to 100 percent renewable energy, 100 percent of the time, as Dixson describes it. The happy outcome came about from the storms destruction of Bucklin Tractor and Implement (BTI), the local John Deere dealership owned by the Estes family. Mark Estes, a representative of the third generation of the family to operate BTI, was among the leading voices calling for a commitment to save the town and restore the business

community in the days after the storm. After all, we were one of the biggest businesses in town, he says. The family decided to rebuild their Greensburg BTI dealership to LEEDplatinum standards, and to erect a wind turbine on the new site. All of this green dealership talk was new territory for John Deere, which nonetheless supported the Estes brothers goals. We had to educate them about what LEED was, Mike Estes recalls. Once they understood, they decided we could be a model of sustainability for other dealerships. Today the Greensburg BTI dealership operates in a 33,000-square-foot metal pre-fabricated building that also contains a large maintenance facility and is indeed LEED-platinum

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big well museum

> BETTER THAN BEFORE At 109 feet deep and 32 feet in diameter, Greenburgs Big Well is the worlds largest hand-dug well. The breathtaking masterpiece was completed in 1888 and served as the towns main water supply until 1932. More than 3 million people have descended the metal stairwell since it was designated as a national museum in 1972. >WIND POWER Wind turbines are scattered throughout Greensburg.
certifiedthe first Deere dealership in the country to be labeled as such. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that the sustainable construction techniques used in building the new dealership have resulted in a 55 percent annual energy savings compared to a typical existing retail facility. Standing alongside the new dealership is an 8,000-square-foot steel warehouse that houses the Estes brothers new ventureBTI Wind Energy. Were in the business now, Estes says with a grin. He describes the new companys investment in small wind technology the use of a small turbine farm or even a single turbine to meet the energy needs of an individual farm or business. Today the wind that nearly destroyed Greensburg is what keeps the towns lights on. Turbines can be seen catching the wind throughout residential neighborhoods and the business community. The energy needs of the larger Greensburg community are met by a wind farm just south of town. The decision to rebuild in greenfriendly ways added to the cost of the towns reconstruction by as much as 20 percent. The expense attracted attention in Washingtonthe source of much of the reconstruction moneyand in June 2008, Hewitt was asked to testify before Congress. His testimony was eloquent and compelling. Green starts in rural America, he said, and the committee was convinced.

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USA TODAYs ECO INNOVATORS

BUILding A MODEL TOWN

The towns unique story, one of devastation and forward-thinking reconstruction, attracted media attention, becoming the subject of two TV series and several books. In 2007, Discovery Channel reached out to Greensburg to film a TV series that would document the green reconstruction of the town. A deal was inked for Greensburg, and environmental activist/actor Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to the project. The series ran for three seasons and documented the day-to-day struggle facing residents. A second mini-series, the four-episode Build It Bigger: Rebuilding Greensburg, premiered in November 2008 on the Science Channel. Several books have been published about the storm and its aftermath, most notably The Greening of Oz, by Robert Fraga, a semi-retired Kansas academic with a longtime interest in sustainable architecture. The reconstruction is nearly complete, and its a model for towns everywhere in this country. A new town has grown up out of the prairie with a spectacular collection of public buildings, Fraga says. Other prairie towns have taken note. Since the Greensburg storm, two more towns have faced

>REBUILD Bob Dixson, Greensburgs mayor since 2008, stands outside the City Council building, which was rebuilt with bricks found in the rubble.

We learned that the only true green and sustainable things in life are how we treat each other.
Bob Dixson, Greensburg mayor destruction from a tornado. An EF4 twister struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., on April 27, 2011, killing 64 people and injuring more than 1,500. The following month a catastrophic EF5 cyclone roared through Joplin, Mo., killing 158 people and injuring 1,100. Both cities have reached out to Greensburg for advice on rebuilding, says Fraga. Mayor Dixson sometimes waxes philosophical about Greensburgs extraordinary rise from the rubble. You have to do the best you can with the resources you have, he says. We learned that the only true green and sustainable things in life are how we treat each other. Hes pleased that many of the rebuilt homes in Greensburg feature roomy front porches. We need to get back to being front-porch people.

BUILDING HOPE
>PASSING IT ON The Greensburg experience can be exported. The towns of Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala., both flattened by tornados, are working to rebuild in green ways. This approach might have seemed on the fringe 15 years ago, but today we havent got much choice, says author Robert Fraga.

Watch our video on Greensburgs rebirth. Scan with a QR reader on your mobile device.

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