The Greensburg Tornado Disaster of 2007 | Episode 89

A wind could remove your hat, a stronger wind might steal your long furniture, But the kind of wind that we're talking about today renovated pre war and mid century Midwestern homes into more open concept dwellings. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we're going to take a look at what happens when you're visited by a storm so powerful they invent a new scale just to define it. We'll see what it feels like to have your house reduced to the consistency of straw and blown away in what many call the most frightening thing that can happen to you in your lifetime. And we will learn to what degree a cow can become turned inside out and forcefully eject its organs. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would find out how badly we'd react if Superman's escape pod approached Earth in twenty twenty five. You'd learn about the absolute physics defying insanity left in the wake of our planet's wins. You'd find out how bad tornado warnings were when you were not allowed to use the word tornado by law. You would learn the entire process of folding lungs from the inside out to the right side inn and how to successfully reinsert them. And we would talk about how your bad day at work does not compare to a nine to eleven dog. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially see save life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. They call Kansas the Heart of America. Lebanon, Kansas is considered the geographic center of the country. But when they say heart they mean that figuratively. They mean it more like a cultural metaphor. See Kansas is a bit like a postcard that captures the essence of America's humble, hard working character. Kansas has wheat fields that stretch farther than the eye can see, skies so wide they make the horizon feel like a promise and towns where folk way from porches not because they know you, but because that's just what you do. Kansas represents America in its purest, most unfiltered form. The cities or the coastal states may slip further into lawless apocalyptic with each passing year, but Kansas remains constant. The history of the Sunflower State is rooted in generational values of family and community and perseverance. It's down to earth. Visitors describe it as warm and unpretentious. Others may think of it as just a flyover state. That's a slur. They think of it as flat and disinteresting. But two things. Finding something boring often says more about you than the actual thing. And second, Kansas is the seventh flattest US state, So that would it surprise you to learn that the actual flattest is Florida. Well take that. So when people refer to Kansas as the Heartland, they aren't just referring to geography. They're pointing to something deeply American, something wholesome and unshakable. And we haven't been here since the grasshop Apocalypse, which reminds me it's also the agricultural back own of the country. They call it part of America's bread basket. All that wheat and corn and cattle. I won't get into it, but for one state they produce an outsized amount of food for the country and celebrities. For the sixteenth least populous state, they sure do grow a lot more than wheat. Dennis Hopper, Joe Walsh, Kirsty Ally, Melissa Ethridge, famous writer, Langston Hughes, NFL Hall of Famer, Barry Sanders, Bob Dole, Dwight Eisenhower, Cameron from Modern Family, he comes from there. Possibly the greatest movie stuntman of all time. Buster Keaton also comes from there, actor with the immortality clause in his Deal with Satan, Paul Rudd, and my personal favorite farmer, journalist, and all around superman Clark Kent. Why did his long dead parents send him to Kansas? Well? Simple, really, back in nineteen thirty eight. To his creators, Kansas represented the humble origin and strong ethics that we associate with Superman. They believe that no other state would have produced a character that more strongly embodied the traditional values of truth, justice, and the American way. We'll be spending our time today in Greensburg, Kansas, a town named after legendary stagecoach driver D. R. Cannonball green They literally had Cannibal Kansas sitting right there in front of them, and they went with Greensburg. It's part of a vast, fairly lightly inhabited region of the Great Plains, about two hours west of Wichita. The landed previously being home to nomadic Plains tribes like the Comanche and the Apache, and the Cheyenne and the Rappaho and Kiowa. In fact, we'll be spending our time in Kiowa County. After they were unceremoniously removed, the land was claimed by France. Then they became part of Spanish territory, then back to the French again for a second time, until they sold it to America as part of the Louisiana purchase in eighteen o three. Greensburg was settled in eighteen eighty six, and within a few years our little frontier settlement boomed and was proclaimed the liveliest town in the state as far as local government went. In rural or less populated areas, the largest or most centrally located town usually became the home of the county's courthouse and government offices. They call it the county seat, and Greensburg became the county seat of Kiowa County. You might say ooh, la lah, but Greensburg didn't become really famous until they finished the Big Well. Long story short, a town needs water for residence and in this case, a railroad, so they decided to hand dig a well one hundred and nine feet deep and thirty two feet wide. You could handily park six Dodge caravans in a space that large. Is if you fit them in bumper first, you could fit nine. The well became Greensburg's most famous landmark. That was until they turned it into a museum and as one of the key draws, one of the largest palasite meteorites ever found. They found it in nineteen forty nine, and the thing weighed over a thousand pounds. Casey didn't know. Palisite means it's made of stony iron, but it's also full of gem quality crystals that make them the most beautiful and scientifically fascinating meteorites around. It was one thousand pound big boy, and of course everyone had seen it. Greensburg was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, the kind of place where neighbors waved at each other on main Street, and farmers chatted about the weather at the local diner. In two thousand and seven, Greensburg had a population of only about fourteen hundred people. Back in the nineties, its population had been closer to two thousand. But around this time time, persistent droughts across the Gray Plains meant farming communities across the country struggled, and Greensburg was no different. Two thousand and six had been one of the driest years on record, especially in western and central Kansas. Some parts only received less than half of their normal rainfall. Greensburg never was an economic powerhouse. I mean, the meteor that hit them wasn't made of solid gold, sadly, but what it lacked in wealth, it more than made up for in heart and spirit. Life in Greensburg was marked by strong community ties. Seasonal festivals, county fairs, high school ballgames, all that kind of thing brought people together year after year, and of course, being a farming community makes for a deep connection to the land. Speaking of Kansas is also quite famously known for tornadoes. Dorothy tried to warn us. Kansas is known as one of the original five tornado alley states, and I created a handy acronym so you will never have to forget them. Subdunct South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and North central Texas. Subdunct You're welcome. Meteorologists needed a way to describe the long vertical swath where tornadoes are particularly intense and frequent, right down the middle of the States. The alley evolves over time, but originally it was kind of shaped like Grimace with his legs blown off. And to be clear, there isn't a part of the United States that does not experience tornadoes. They're just rarer in some parts. The West Coast barely ever gets them, and Alaska is even rarer. The only place on Earth that doesn't get tornadoes is Antarctica. But saying that snow natoes are a thing, fire natos are a thing. People just don't really understand what tornadoes are capable of. They can travel hundreds of miles, they can change direction and pivot on a dime. They can pick up and throw that dime as fast as a bullet for more than a mile. In nineteen thirty one, in Cordell, Kansas, just a few hours away from Greensburg, a piece of straw was quite famously driven through a tree. In our past Tri State Tornado disaster of nineteen twenty five, episode debris was thrown two hundred miles or three hundred and twenty kilometers away. Tornadoes can travel over water, they can even form in mountains. There is very little that they cannot do. And technically tornadoes do have a season that's March through June, with May and June being the busiest, but to be clear, they can absolutely appear year round. The really long story short is tornado Alley describes an area where warm, boistair from the Gulf of Mexico meets cold, dry air from the Rockies or Canada. But wait, does this have anything to do with today's story? Well, our story Biggins May the fourth, two thousand and seven. It was one of those warm and humid spring days that seemed to press in from all sides. It was about eighty two fahrenheit or around twenty eight celsius. The skies were partly cloudy over central and western Kansas, and winds were breezy out of the south. Nothing weird. Kids rode past their neat little houses. The high school baseball team was wrapping up practice. People were still putting pies out to cool on their window sills, and the locals all reported that the weather in Queensburg was uneventful until around five or six PM, when those breezes began to turn into winds. There was a strong low level jet of warm, moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico and thunderstorms began to form. Meteorologists had been side eyeing the skies all afternoon, and it turns out a powerful storm system was developing across the Central Plains. All that warm southerly wind was colliding with cooler, dryer air from the north, and this was creating strong wind shear. And you know general volatility. When winds at different heights blow at different speeds or directions, they call that wind shear. It's the kind of thing that can slap a plane out of the air, and sometimes does. But thankfully, we will not be flying today, not in any traditional sense. At least. By six point thirty, the skies were darkening and radar out of Dodge City was tracking a super cell developing just west of Greensburg. So you know, a supercell is basically an oversized thunderstorm with a rotating center. They call it a mesocyclone, and the only reason Kansons what care is every now and then mesocyclones can spin off thunderstorms and tornadoes. The weather radar was lit up west of US near Mead and Clark Counties, and the National Weather Service had issued a PDS, or a Particularly Dangerous Situation tornado watch. In an average year in the States, they might have about twelve hundred tornadoes, but they only get maybe one or two dozen PDS watches, so it was a bit of a rare warning, but nothing to really worry about yet. That said, there were clouds off in the distance, dark ones. Greensburg was small, obviously, and their fire station doubled as their emergency operations center. Of course, an emergency in Greensburg is usually maybe a brushfire or a medical call, or maybe the occasional truck accident out on the interstate. They've seen this kind of thing a thousand times. And other than the strange color of the sky turning that particularly greenish gray, there was no real wind and there were no sirens. They knew they might get a show, but they weren't overly worried. Most people in Greensburg grew up with tornado sirens and safety drills, and like I said, they'd seen a thing or two. Kansas are not known for worrying for worry's sake. By seven fifteen, the local news stations were talking about a storm system forming west of town, like we said, and they were using words like rotation and wall cloud to describe it. People were no stranger to TV weather drama, but the early weather reports were becoming more serious by the hour, and their tone had a little urgency to it. But they were going to have to try a lot harder than that if they wanted the people to stop being dinner and lightly panic. The vast majority of weather warnings never turned into anything, thankfully, but also regrettably, because of this, people maybe don't take them quite as serious after their thirtieth false alarm. Police roaming on patrol often become the first eyes of any tornado watch, and in this case, the voice of a deputy west of Bucklin broke over the radio to say, we've got a funnel on the ground near Sitka and it's big, and by big he meant over a mile or one point six kilometers wide. Their first thought was about where they could do the most good. They thought about heading to Greensburg's Kiowa County Memorial Hospital or to the high school gym since it was also designated as an emergency shelter. Their fear was that the hospital only had twenty beds and would be quickly overwhelmed if this turned into anything serious. They were also questioning whether the high school gym would survive a direct hit from something as big as what they just saw. Instead, they chose to park at the fire station, with the rest of the trucks near the center of town ready to deploy, provided that the firehouse wasn't it. The storm was quickly becoming the worst kept secret in this part in the state, and by a thirty emergency managers at the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Kiowa County and slapped that big red button to activate the localized tornado warning sirens. A low, steady whale echoed through town. And that is the kind of thing that gets people's attention, the kind of thing that has you grabbing your kids and your cat and your portable radio and heading for the basement. When sirens wail, about a third of people will take shelter immediately. Another third will stop to check on neighbors and loved ones making sure that they're as protected as they can be. And that final third is always the people who stubbornly wait and watch the weather from their porches, thinking if a tornado did appear, it was just going to veer north and fall apart in the open fields. You gotta remember, this was not their first rodeo, so it's easy to be attentive but cynical, but this was different. A lot of people would later say that they sought shelter because there was just something in the meteorologi's voice, something they couldn't quite explain, but something that told them this was it. By nine o'clock, the weather was escalating, rained again, falling in thick sheets, while lightning lit up the clouds like camera flashes. Many said it was the most frightening lightning that they had ever seen, and each flash illuminated the sky, showing the churning or spinning rather than the drifting, which is really what you were hoping for. And if there's anything less calming than seeing a tornado illuminated by lightning strikes, or if a transformer explodes, I don't know what that is. It's horror movie stuff. Within fifteen minutes, storm watchers were radioing in warnings that a massive tornado had formed just west of town, and the National Weather Service confirmed it wasn't just forming, it was already on the ground and heading directly for Greensburg. So you're trying to watch TV and you're flipping around, but every channel has some version of a weatherman jumping up and down yelling at you that you are about to get blown to Oklahoma. Would you know what to do? Reporters instructed people to head for their basements and stay away from the windows. Well, you got no basement in that case, you want to pick a small room on the lowest level of their house as close to the center of the house as you can. Your closet, a bathroom, even a pantry can work. Just think about the layout of your house. You want to put as many walls between you and the outside of your house as possible. In this tornado, reporters ask people to turn the volume all the way up on their TVs or computers so they could hear updates and information right up to the last second, or at least as long as the power lasted. If the space you're in starts to collapse. Most of us grew up with the advice that you are supposed to hide under the biggest, strongest or sturdiest thing in the room, a heavy desk, a table, something solid enough to use like a shield to block falling debris if the space that you're in is starting to collapse, like the ceiling is coming down. Here's the thing. If you're about to become taller than your room and you want to stay that way, but you don't own a nineteen hundreds era oak pedestal banker's desk, would you know what to do then? So everything you own came from Ikea or yard sales, and none of it's very sturdy. In that event, you want to lay down and snuggle up beside the biggest strongest piece of furniture in the room, a sofa, a bed, even your oven, anything with any kind of real weight or hef to it. You know, the roof comes down, and those kind of things can create a survivable space beside them, just an empty little pocket where whatever you chose to lay beside braces the falling debris to its crush height. The goal is to let furniture absorb the crush so that you have that little safe zone to breathe in. That said, the odds of you being struck by flying or falling material is also very high, so taking cover under something solid does protect you from glass or debris or toppling bookcases. Hopefully you just understand that you have different options appropriate for different situations. And you know that sometimes people will grab the TV remote and a houseplant and then just run full tilt into a wall in a city situation. This frightening, and it happens, hopefully not to you. Just try to remember you've got options, and you've got a brain, So protect your head and stay low and shield yourself and in the worst case scenario, that triangle of life could save your life. Now, to help you understand what happened here this day, I need you to understand a few things about tornadoes. The average tornado doesn't get to be more than five hundred feet across at the base of the funnel. But to all appearances, this one appeared to be all funnel. We all understand the lanky, bendy dancing like a rope style tornado videos, but this appeared as an enormous wedge or a fat funnel that spanned a broad portion of the visible horizon. So you know, a wedge tornado, as seen from the ground, is a type of tornado that appears wider than it does tall, and this one was monstrously huge. By now. It was over a mile or one point six kilometers wide and slowly moving bearing east towards town. And again here is the thing. A tornado can be the most frightening thing that happens to you in your entire lifetime, and at night, the large span and low contrast against the night sky and then being surrounded with rain and debris can make them effectively invisible. Warnings were now being announced everywhere, with text alerts and cell phones buzzing across town. Meteorologists at the Dodge City National Weather Service Office could actually see a debris ball forming inside the funnel without getting into it. A debris ball is basically an unmistakable sign that this tornado was already shredding whatever it touched as it moved, which it did slowly, approaching town at only twenty miles or thirty two kilometers an hour. Spotters confirmed it was moving slowly but steadily towards town. Parents grab their kids and ran for basements or storm shelters or whatever cover they could find. Some ran to their neighbour's homes. Others gathered in church basements, or they crouched in bathtubs or huddled with their families in shelters that hadn't been opened in years. By nine forty one, the storm was less than four miles southwest of Greensburg. The lightning had picked up, and golf ball sized hail was now falling from the sky. Doppler radar estimated the wind speeds were exceeding two hundred and five miles or three hundred and thirty kilometers per hour. Oh and it had now grown to one point seven miles or two point seven kilometers across. That was wider than the town itself. The power flickered and the sound of wind outside grew from a strong whistle to a low, rising roar. Some said they felt the walls of their homes bowing inwards. Meteorologists David Freeman from KOs and w and Wichita got right to the point. He said, if you were in Greensburg, you must be underground now. Farms south of town were already being swept clean, with homes being torn off, well bolted foundations demolished and scattered like straw across the fields. Grain silos ripped open like tin cans, and by nine forty five many of the people there that day described the moment of all consuming an unnatural stillness and silence as the tornado entered the southwest edge of Greensburg, also like something out of a horror movie. This all happened right before the pressure changed and windows exploded into millions of pieces. Ears popped painfully, and the sound that followed was a roar that sounded like everything breaking at once, wood snapping, metal twisting, glass shattering in waves. The air pressure plummeted and buildings imploded as the tornado bore down, ripping homes apart and pinning and burying residents under heavy shredded debris. From there, it traveled roughly along Main Street, cutting directly through the heart of town. Entire streets of houses were erased as it went, reduced to splinters and blown away from underground. The lights finally went out when the last remaining power lines were shredded. This, of course, meant very little to those squeezing their eye shut as everything around them was being pulled apart by forces They could only hear and feel, like when your roof is removed or a truck flies into your living room. People huddled in the dark, holding on to whoever they were with and praying that their shelter would hold. Even the police and fire fighters had to abandon their posts and seek shelter with only seconds to spare as. The Emergency Operations Center slash fire Hall was destroyed, along with most of the city's emergency vehicles, which were picked up and thrown as if Mother Nature were a tantruming child and it must have sucked up some spinature something. By the time the vortex reached the downtown area, it had gained what they call extreme strength, and extreme strength meant e F five intensity, the deadliest and most destructive class of tornado. It took only seconds for the entire business district to become unrecognizable, the Big Well museum and gift shop gone. In the rail yard, freight cars were being flipped off the tracks, and for reference, a freight car weighs about thirty tons empty, which they were not, and one tanker car had been loaded with ammonia before it was ripped apart. So imagine getting effectively tear gas during all of this city hall, the library, a half dozen churches, the furniture store, the grocery store, the hardware store, and blocks of shops along main Street were obliterated. So you know, the definition of obliterated is to destroy something so thoroughly and unquestioningly that there remains no evidence that it previously existed. So basically, take every staple of small town life, turn off the lights, now, blend it and sprinkle everywhere. This thing even ripped pavement and fire hydrants out of the ground. It was as if God's almighty thumb smeared everything off the map. One of the very few things left mostly intact, looming over an otherwise flattened landscape was a single concrete grain silo on the north side of town. Imagine a living, breathing community full of warmth and hope and two story brick hombs, And now the tallest thing that you can see is a person on their knees sobbing. There was a motel on the west side of town was it collapsed and its guest cars were crushed like pophans and tossed. The local elementary school was leveled and crushed into rubble, and exactly as they had worried. The Kiowa County Memorial Hospital suffered a direct hit. The town's newly opened high school gym, meant to serve as an emergency shelter, also collapse. And here is the thing about this tornado that made it so utterly, unbelievably, impossibly dangerous and unexpected. I said, the tornado entered Greensburg at nine fifty and will remind you this was a town smaller than the diameter of the storm. Well, it didn't leave Greensburg till nine fifty seven. So let me say it like this. Greensburg is roughly one and a half square miles or three point eight square kilometers. The tornado was one point seven miles or two point seven kilometers across. This tornado sat on the town and scrubbed it for six to seven minutes, And that alone would make it unspeakably horrific and fascinating. But wait, there's more. This was the first recorded case of an EF five level tornado on the newly enhanced Fujeta tornado scale. And just to say it quickly, EF five's are the most violent storms that this planet can produce. Their winds can turn cars and trucks into airborne missiles, tear asphalt off roads, debark entire forests, and scrub any building right down to the foundation like we saw. To keep track, we've measured tornado wind speeds and damage using doctor Tetsuya Fajita's famous Fujita Scale since nineteen seventy one. It ranks tornadoes between F zero and F five based on wind speed and damage, and just a few months before our story today, the enhanced Fujita Scale had been unveiled. It's largely the same, but it just uses better damage indicators and better estimates on wind speed, so it's just more accurate. What makes any of five so dangerous, it's not so much the wind. It's what wind that fast can do. These are sustained and pulverizing winds that won't just collapse home. It's gonna lift it and shred it and scatter it for blocks or miles. These are winds that are capable of leveling reinforced buildings. Imagine Category five hurricane, only faster and confined into a much narrower path of destruction. Like a laser. The very air itself becomes a lethal blizzard of debris moving faster than highway speeds, cars, beams, bricks, even tree trunks. And now imagine listening to all of this in the dark, huddled in fear of your life, and not just of dying, but of being pulled into the sky and ripped apart vertically. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to rip a body apart vertically? Sorry? My point is that this went on for seven minutes, and the storm continued east until it finally dissipated. It had been on the ground for over fifty minutes, traveled about twenty six miles or forty two kilometers, and in seven of those minutes it eviscerated ninety five percent of the town. So what happened? Well, around nine pm, stormchasers reported a funnel cloud touching down in the open countryside west of town. Just a simple twister started out small, but rapidly borrowed strength from the intense rotation in the parent storm. There were several twisters that spewed out of the edges of the original mesocyclone that day before the one dominant funnel took over and demanded all the attention. In spite of being only one of over one hundred and thirty tornadoes that struck across more than a dozen states between the fourth and sixth of May. By the time hour tornado reached the town's outskirts, it had ballooned into a wedge over a mile and a half wide, grinding up everything in its path, lifting thousands of tons of soil and debris into the sky. At nine to forty five on May fourth, two thousand and seven, just fifteen minutes after sirens first blaired across town, Greensburg took a direct hit from one of the fiercest tornadoes in living memory. In the days the fall of the disaster, emergency responders, locals, and volunteers came together to search for survivors, and aid poured in from across the country. Survivors were found in bathtubs and storm cellars, even bank vaults, literally anywhere strong enough to resist a wind that can twist steel like ribbon. And I have to say, whether you believe in it or not, luck definitely plays a role here too. Forecasters issued a tornado warning about forty minutes early, and as lead times go, this was extraordinary. The average lead time for a warning is closer to twelve to fifteen minutes. This was so much longer than the average, and it would later be credited with saving countless lives. Some animals were found alive days later. They were dazed or injured, and they were found miles away from their homes. And so far in this story, all I've tried to do here is put a little bit of a scare into you. But that is about to change. The most disturbing details around this whole thing surrounded the cattle. Here's the part where I tell you too fast forward thirty seconds if you do not want to hear this all right, for the rest of us, cattle had been cattle pulted for miles and were treated just as poorly in the air as they were upon landing. Others were found impaled with two by fours and fence posts. Others had been degloved by the wind. That is to say, their skins or hides were forcefully removed from the muscle and underlying tissue while they were still alive. And that's not even the worst worst detail. The worst worst detail. Sometimes their lungs would be pulled out of their bodies like a wet ass looking party whistle that was never ever meant to be blown. You would either call that a traumatic evisceration or a thoracic evulsion. The nicest way to say it is that their lungs became partially or completely externalized. Long story mersively bereft of detail, is that extreme internal pressure changes rupture body cavities. The suction or pressure difference can tear open or displace the wind pipe. In a particularly awful case, the entire thorax can tear open, which now allows for previously internal organs to be drawn out for a little sun and fresh air. Photographs of this were taken, but were never intended for public consumption. I sincerely apologize to anyone who only fast forwarded fifteen seconds and threw up dropped me a line at the end of the show, and I am very happy to facilitate any and all of you with customized barf bags. But I am about to tell my patreons the entire process of folding lungs from the inside out to right side in and how to successfully re insert them. Longtime resident fay Hargandin didn't have a basement to shelter in, so she lay trapped in the corner, all curled up as her home disintegrated all around her. And she later told reporters it took a minute to realize that she was even still alive. Her legs had been pinned, and her only window to the outside world was literally a window, or rather a blown out hole in her home, or a window used to be. She cried for help over the sound of the rain until a faint beam of a flashlight passed by her and then grew closer. A neighbor pulled her free of the wreckage through that window hole. Similar scenes were playing out across town in the terrifying minutes after the tornado. Survivors crawled out from under collapsed houses into the open air, completely dazed and confused. They emerged into a world that they wouldn't or couldn't recognize. The entire town had been plunged into total darkness, with the power lines all gone and cellular service was either sketchy or non existent. Jean Bradley and his wife survived and left to check on their adult children who lived near by, but they couldn't figure out how to even get there. Every landmark had been erased, and the only light came from the glow of fires started by ruptured gas lines or downed electrical transformers. Resident Penny Caine put it more succinctly. She said, Greensburg is gone. If you look around, it's gone, just gone. People lit their way with cell phones or flashlights, calling out to find family and neighbors. In the darkened chaos. They found people with broken bones, lacerations, and some too shocked to even speak. Some were found trapped in collapse basements, beneath to break, too heavy to lift without machinery, and with most of the town's emergency vehicles either flipped or buried or destroyed, rescuers had to carry their gear and just hoof it, and worse, they were forced to guess where they were most needed. Volunteers continued the desperate search for anyone trapped in the rubble, because this is one of those disasters where you cannot just assume that people will raise a hand if they need help. Their hand could be on their lawn, so you have to search every home and building just to be sure. One of the first responders brought his dog, Retta, and she was a black lab, but she'd also been trained as a search and rescue dog, sniffing through piles of rubble for any signs of life. Neighbors formed human chains. Some removed timber and drywall and random debris by hand, others putting out fires with buckets, and when they found someone alive and pulled them in too safety, it brought a rare moment of joy. Same when the rain finally died down around midnight, residents were gathered in stunned clusters on what had been their streets. They comforted one another, even as some still searched frantically for missing loved ones, and the community's worst fears were confirmed. By dawn, the town they knew was virtually leveled. There's only so many ways to say it. In a town of about fourteen hundred, the storm had destroyed nine hundred and sixty one homes and businesses, had taken twelve lives and injured more than sixty. But the fact that so many survived such a powerful onslaught made it feel like a miracle. There wasn't a person in Greensburg who didn't know someone who had been lost. When I say the damage Greenberg sustained was apocalyptic, we say that from time to time on this show. But when I say the damage Greensburg sustained was apocalyptic, I mean there are a few words more well suited or well earned to describe what residents saw. About ninety five percent of the town was unrecognizable. Actually, five percent of the town was unrecognizable. Ninety five percent of it was gone. Aerial photos showed an apocalyptic grid of flatten neighborhoods, reduced to little more than the concrete slabs that marked where the homes used to be. All that remained was the occasional scrap of litter or a shard of wood. One reporter on the scene said, simply, there is no Greensburg. You want to hear rescuers say, yes, obviously this looks bad, but please take heart. We have seen so much worse, and here is a plan on how we're going to fix it. But instead you get people walking around comparing it to bomb sites. From ground level, former tree lined streets were now lined with jagged, leafless sticks of denuded wood poking from the ground. Most of them were gone, but of the ones that remain, some of them had the twisted remains of vehicles wrapped around them. The air was thick with the smell of splintered wood and leaking gas and wet plaster, and when you think about approaching a small midwestern town. The first thing that you spot on your approach is usually the water tower. It's usually the tallest thing in most towns, but not Greensburg's. It lay crumbled onto its side, kind of smeared into the ground. Rescue convoys arrived from other Kansas towns and even nearby states. As emergency responders arrived, they were immediately overwhelmed by the scale of the destruction. They had to pick their way through the down power lines to even reach Greenberg. The focus had been finding survivors and making sure everyone in town had been accounted for. A DIY triage center was set up at the edge of town to treat the injured before deciding who gets to go to which hospitals. In Wichita, everyone from volunteer groups to the church ladies to the Red Cross had set up their own operations. FEMA arrived and along with the National Guard, they helped clear roads and set up temporary communications and even landing zones for helicopters to bring in generators in water and food and everything else you could possibly need, and also to ferry out the severely wounded. The National Guard assisted with search and rescue and every resident was a counted four. And it is shocking, absolutely shocking, how low the death toll was, considering only five percent of the town stood much taller than a mailbox. Officials from the National Weather Service could not emphasize enough how incredible it was and how overjoyed they were that so many a heard the warnings and b found adequate shelter. News crews arrived to document the devastation in the days to come, and images of the town's obliterated neighborhoods led national newscasts. Millions were left shocked at how complete the destruction had been. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius toured the wreckage before President George W. Bush declared the whole county a federal disaster area. Fields that used to grow wheat were now covered in Red Cross shelters and FEMA emergency housing trailers for families that now found themselves homeless and scattered. This proud small town had weathered hard times for droughts, dust storms, farm crises, and they had always endured it with a sense of neighborly cheer. But in those early weeks following this tornado, there was a very real question amongst the survivors of whether Greensburg would or even should continue to exist. Could a small rural town devastated so completely ever return to what it was. Older residents just didn't have the heart or sadly the years left to start over from scratch, and decided not to return to Greensburg after being evacuated and resettled elsewhere. It's understandable, but a core group of citizens with deeper roots to the land were determined that Greensburg should not be erased, and rather than simply replicating the old town, they made a bold decision. Not only would they rebuild, but Greensburg, Kansas would become the greenest town in America. Everything from the schools to the hall to the hospital would be reimagined as energy efficient, environmentally responsible, and future facing wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal heating, led street lights, rain water collection, all of it. Rebuilding the town became an extreme exercise in plansmanship. Homes were rebuilt with recycled materials, and the tiny town slowly became a model of transformation. What began as a small farming community in the middle of the Great Plains became a national symbol of resilience and ongoing resilience through sustainability. Now some of you may be booing that the most American of all Americans decided to go hippie, but it's not what you think. There's nothing political about it. These people were mostly conservative, religious, small town folks. They didn't go hippie out of spite, and they certainly didn't do it for political reasons. They weren't looking to the future so much as they were looking at their own past. See historically and traditionally, the heartland of the American prairie was always self reliant. It had to be. They harnessed the sun and the wind for survival. More than one hundred years ago, they were returning to their roots and to get things started, they built a twelve and a half megawatt wind farm just outside of town that generated more power than the town could even use. They were into rotational land use and water conservation and preventing wind erosion. The local John Deere dealership even turned into a wind turbine distributor. They also updated their building codes to encourage better storm resistance. They were built with higher winds in mind, and many of them now had storm shelters or safe rooms built right into them. And it wasn't just a curiosity for their fellow Americans. People visited here from around the world. And I don't mean disaster tourists. I mean people who were interested in a one hundred percent renewably powered community. No government mandates, no partisan laws, nothing con troversial about it. Just the will of the people made manifest and it worked. Their green initiatives attracted all kinds of attention and investment, and they even managed to save over two hundred thousand dollars a year in energy bills. Disaster response experts point to Greensburg as an example of the right way to do post disaster rebuilding. Engage the community and incorporate some long term thinking into the very blueprint of the place. Now, not to oversell it, but in terms of intensity, the Greensburg tornado disaster of two thousand and seven stands on par with the most violent tornadoes in US history. It just lacked the death toll to put it in the same category as the Joplin, Missouri tornado of twenty eleven or the Tri State tornado of nineteen twenty five. If Greensburg, the town itself had been the size of Joplin or more, the outcome could have been far more catastrophic. Also, the Joplind twenty eleven tornado happened in the late afternoon and it caught a lot of people sitting in traffic. But Greensburg came at night when most everyone was already at home and probably near a TV or radio, and nearly everyone had access of appropriate storm sheltering. As one meteorologist put it, Greensburg's tragedy could have rivaled the worst ever but for a few key factors that went right. They described it as a success story within a horror story. Greensburg, Kansas, once known merely for a big hole in the ground, is now known for inspiring the entire world with their resilience and capacity, is now known for inspiring the world with their resilience and capacity to find meaning in rebuilding. This tornado was the first EF five ever recorded, and until the Joplin tornado of twenty eleven, it had one of the largest post tornado federal disaster responses in US history. The Greensburg tornado disaster of two thousand and seven is ranked among the highest percentages of total destruction for any modern US town, and it is considered one of the most devastating and significant tornadoes in United States history. This is actually a very special episode of doomsday, and for a most unusual reason. We've seen almost every kind of natural weather phenomena kill and injure and destroy at will. This disaster admittedly didn't have the kind of death toll that you maybian probably should associate with our stories, and that is what makes it so special. This is the first and only weather related disaster we have ever done where we did not make fun of meteorologists. Remember meteorol just David Freeman from KSNW and Wichita. He stayed on the air through everything that happened that night, just hoping that his clear and urgent warnings reached people with enough time. And when people tied him for interrupting a football game or forgetting his forecast wrong, he asks, do you know why God made economists to make meteorologists look good? His work that day was praised by emergency managers and the National Weather Service, and I want to praise him personally as a good man doing good work. And he later spoke publicly about the immense weight that he felt knowing each live warning could mean the difference between life and death for his viewers. He once had to trace the path of a tornado live on the air that headed directly towards his house. With his son at home alone. He carried the emotional toll of covering this event with him just like a nine to eleven dog, Which will only make sense if you were listening to this on Patreon. Speaking of, did you know Patreon is not the best way to support the show? Sharing it is, and sharing is caring Now Patreon is actually the best way to keep the host from dying while producing it. But if you feel like a contribution to ongoing stories might make the world a one percent better place, you could always just drop a one time donation at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it, then I think you should head over and find out more at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoozoo, and I want to offer a quick but heartfelt shout out too. David Mason, Lauren Stapleton, Miles Berry, Ouji Rougie carry at Jacqueline Megan and Frank Tobin for helping to support the show on Patreon. Again, there is no show without you people. So for those of you who do and you know who you are, I'm going to ask you to do one quick thing. Raise your hands as if you were surrendering to someone with a gun. Now take your left hand and place it just behind your right armpit on your back. Now take your right hand and place it over your left shoulder, and now pack yourself on the back. For the rest of the episode, you can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my supporters, new and old. Yes, I'm very much signaling out the people who have been supporters in the past and have not been able to continue for any number of reasons. I still care, thank you so much. Now that said, to try to make the world a slightly better place, I always take moment to ask you to consider making a donation to Global medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot CAA. On the next episode, Hey nerds, you remember that time that Kirk got into it with that Gorn and they had to do that slow mo slap fight in the hills behind Los Angeles. Well, that has absolutely nothing to do with our next episode, so I apologize if you get confused by the title. It's the USS Enterprise Explosion of nineteen sixty nine. We'll talk soon. Safety gag goes off and thanks for listening.