Greensburg, Kansas, was a thriving farming town of 1,500 souls prior to May 4. It had a
co-op grain elevator, a successful farm equipment dealership, grocery and hardware stores, and just about everything else a rural community needs to be a good place to live. But after that day, the town resembled nothing so much as the aftermath of a nuclear blast.
A monster of a tornado raged through Greensburg’s pleasant tree-lined streets at 10 p.m., killing 14 people. The tornado’s funnel was 1.7 miles wide, with winds exceeding 200 miles per hour. It smashed most of the town to matchsticks, crumpled cars and trucks like soda cans and ripped the leaves, branches and even bark from hundreds of trees. “Rural Cooperatives” visited Greensburg six weeks after the disaster to see how the recovery was progressing.
“The house shook,
the earth shook,
and we could hear
Greensburg
disappearing...”
Co-op
Salvages
Hope Amid
Ruins
Southern Plains takes a licking, but keeps on ticking
By Stephen Thompson,
Assistant editor
stephenA.thompson@wdc.usda.gov
e’re still here!” says
Danny McLarty,
manager of Southern
Plains Co-op’s
Greensburg operation,
when asked how things are going.
“We’re serving our customers,” he adds,
with pride in his voice.
The May 4 Greensburg megatornado
did its best to put Southern
Plains, a local grain and farm
supply/service cooperative, out of
business. The co-op lost ten vehicles,
including two expensive fertilizer
applicators and its dry fertilizer facility.
The twister also destroyed the co-op’s
feed mill and a 60’ x 100’ steel
maintenance shed. Its office building
was destroyed, its grain drier shredded
and a retail outlet flattened. One of its
steel buildings was picked up and
wrapped around a grove of trees. Only
the concrete elevator, the truck scale
and the liquid fertilizer facility could be
salvaged.
Still, says McLarty, “We were up and
running in a week.”
That was good news for co-op
members who were preparing for the
wheat harvest when Rural Cooperatives
visited. “In an agricultural community,
we’ve got to take care of the growers,”
says McLarty. “Because the rest of the
community depends on their revenue.”
The cooperative is one of the largest
and most important business in the
small agricultural town of Greensburg.
With most of the town having to start
again from scratch, the co-op’s
continued operation may make the
difference between the community’s
future prosperity or a painful decline.
Employees rise to occasion
The co-op’s resurrection was due in
large part to the efforts of cooperative
employees, some of whom had lost
their own homes in the storm.
Alan Allison, who runs the elevator,
saw his own house and his parents’
home destroyed. But soon after the
storm was over, he was at the co-op site,
working to contain the damage. Three
other co-op employees also lost their
houses. Workers from the co-op’s other
facility, in nearby Lewis, hurried over to
help without any prompting. They
worked from 11 p.m. until about 6:30
the next morning, and then returned
after only an hour of rest.
Of immediate concern were leaks
from anhydrous ammonia and propane
gas tanks, which had valves knocked off
by flying debris. The propane leak was
dealt with fairly quickly, but the
ammonia leak was another story:
workers were unable to get close
enough to effect repairs.
Luckily, the wind was blowing the
dangerous gas away from the town.
Before they could seal the leak, says
McLarty, “We just had to wait until the
pressure drop froze the ammonia in the
tank.”
Co-op workers spent the weekend
picking through the ruins of the office.
The roof of the small, one-story
building was gone and its walls
collapsed, but the crew was able to
recover vital records and some
equipment. A portable building was
ordered to serve as a temporary
replacement, and plans to replace the
destroyed facilities were set in motion.
By Wednesday (five days after the
storm), the temporary office building
had been installed and the vital truck
scale was back in operation. The
salvaged customer records are now
neatly filed in cardboard boxes. It took
another day to obtain and set up a
portable generator to power the
elevator machinery. In the interim, the
elevator’s windows and doors — blown
out in the storm — had to be replaced,
as well as some of its heavy steel
inspection hatches that had been sucked
away by the twister. One of the legs, or
chutes, of the elevator also needed to be
replaced, having been mangled when an
airborne car apparently hit it 120 feet
above the ground.
Once the power was on, the contents
of the bins were turned over to ensure
against moisture damage. The liquid
fertilizer facility, consisting mostly of
wind-resistant steel tanks and pipes, was
quickly restored to working order, as
well.
Merger brought critical resources
Luck played a part in the facility’s
revival. With the Kansas wheat harvest
only weeks away, the survival of the
elevator and the truck scale meant that
they would be ready to handle
members’ grain on schedule. And
member farmers need access to supplies
of liquid fertilizer to avoid damage to
the irrigated corn prevalent in the area.
The other facilities aren’t as critical.
Another stroke of good fortune, it
turned out, was the decision two years
before to merge the Greensburg
cooperative, then called Farmers Grain
and Supply Inc., with the larger Lewis
Cooperative, 25 miles away. Board
member Scott Brown believes the
resources made available by the merger
may well make the difference between
failure and recovery. “If the merger
hadn’t gone through, it could have been
the last nail in our coffin,” he declares.
Brown says that the cooperative
spirit governs the relationship between
the members of the two branches of the
co-op. “The merged co-op was run as a
single family from the beginning,” he
says, which removed a potentially
serious source of conflict. With such
extensive damage and a majority of the
directors from the other location, they
could have chosen to cut their losses
and shut the damaged facility down.
“It would have been easy to just take
the insurance check and move
everything to Lewis,” says Brown. “But
the board voted unanimously to replace
and upgrade. There wasn’t any
hesitation.”
Workers from the Lewis branch of
the co-op have also been a great help in
getting things back together, says
McLarty. “Whenever things are a little
slow over there, they come over here to
see if there’s anything they can do.”
Co-op president Ron Gruber joins
McLarty in having nothing but praise
for the efforts of the co-op’s employees.
“They really went all out, day and
night, to put us back in business,” he
says. He also praises their suppliers.
“They’ve all been excellent. They
deserve a lot of credit for helping us get
back on our feet. The company
providing the replacement chemical
building, for example, usually takes
eight to ten weeks to deliver an order.
But for us they moved it up to six.”
Gruber is especially complimentary
of the Julian Lumber Co. of Antlers,
Okla., which, he says, besides their
responsiveness to the co-op’s needs,
sent up truckloads of fence posts and
made them available free of charge to
anyone who needed them. Even some
neighboring cooperatives, normally
competitors, sent help, which Gruber
said is also greatly appreciated.
Long way to go
The work won’t be finished for quite
a while. The office building is already
framed and roofed, but it won’t be
ready for use until about Sept. 1. The
chemical warehouse was scheduled for
completion July 15, and the dry
fertilizer building was scheduled for
completion by the end of August. The
co-op’s “Crop Shop,” a retail outlet, will
not be completed until sometime next
winter. The feed mill will not be rebuilt
due to high costs imposed by new
building codes.
Some debris still needed to be
removed or salvaged when Rural
Cooperatives visited the town six weeks
after the storm. Facilities and
equipment such as the elevator’s grain
drier, destroyed vehicles and dozens of
smaller, less critical items still needed to
be replaced or repaired. Luckily, says
McLarty, the grain received by the coop
usually has a low moisture content
and doesn’t need drying. Alan Allison
says salvaging equipment can be
discouraging. “You look at something
and think, ‘Maybe we can save this.’ But
you look at it again and, nope, it’s bent.”
Meanwhile, income is down due to
lost feed and fuel sales, and grain
revenue has been affected by the
inconvenience of making deliveries by
truck through streets often blocked by
cleanup efforts. Gruber has been
discussing the shortfalls with the co-op’s
insurance provider.
Some problems are more frustrating
than others, Gruber says. “The
infrastructure here is just a wreck,” he
says. Water service was finally restored
to the co-op a month and a half after
the storm, and electrical service was still
pending. Gruber notes that the
municipal power company required the
co-op to purchase its own transformer.
The electric cooperatives it deals with
at other locations supply transformers
as part of their service. The co-op
wants municipal power so it can reopen
its service station, now being rebuilt,
providing a much-needed fuel source to
the community.
Ironically, one of the biggest
potential problems facing the
cooperative stems from the rebuilding
effort. Government officials want to use
the opportunity to improve the traffic
pattern through the town.
Unfortunately, the proposed traffic plan
would cause serious difficulties for
trucks using the elevator and truck
scales, forcing them to make long
detours and making it difficult for them
to make turns entering and exiting the
facility. Gruber has been conferring
with state and local government
officials, and is working to make sure
the co-op’s needs are accommodated.
The co-op difference
The decision to rebuild and improve
the Greensburg facility illustrates an
important difference between the rural
cooperative culture and that of many
other businesses. A business run solely
for the profit of investors, faced with
the same circumstances, might well
have decided to cut costs by shutting
down its damaged facility and
consolidating its operations.
Southern Plains instead chose to
renew its commitment to a community
that will need many years to recover
from a crippling disaster, because its
directors see serving that community as
part of its mission.
That commitment will mean
spending about $1 million over and
above the insurance payout, leaving the
co-op with a substantial debt. “But the
farmers are still going to be here,” says
Brown. “We knew we’d be serving the
same number of acres we always served.
That made the decision easier.”
Co-op people weather the storm
The night the tornado came to Greensburg, Tom Doherty
and his wife took refuge in their basement minutes before it
hit. As the wind built up to a deafening shriek, the basement
windows blew open, letting in a blast of rain. “I tried to close
them, but they blew back in my face,” he remembers.
That may have saved their lives, because if the windows
had been closed, the twister’s terrific suction might have
ripped away the floor above their heads. As it was, the drop in
air pressure was so strong, he says, “It felt like your head
was just going to split!”
When the terrifying roar of the storm tapered off, Doherty,
a long-time employee of Farmers Cooperative Co. in nearby
Haviland, looked up to find that the outside entrance to his
basement had been ripped away. He stuck his head outside to
find most of his house destroyed as well. But he had little time
to think about it: this tornado was so huge — later determined
to be 1.7 miles wide — that it had a calm center, like the eye
of a hurricane. So it wasn’t long before the wind began to
blow again as the leeward side of the storm slammed through
town.
When it was finally over, almost everything Tom Doherty
owned — house, vehicles, and the personal mementos and
possessions accumulated in 62 years of life — had been
destroyed or simply vanished.
Hard rain, wall of black
A few miles west of Greensburg, Southern Plains Cooperative
board member Scott Brown was driving toward town
when he heard the tornado warning on the radio. He pulled
over about three-quarters of a mile out of town and peered
through the rain and hail hammering his windshield, looking
for the telltale funnel cloud.
“Everything was just black,” he recalls. “But every now
and then there was a flash of lightning.” The flashes illuminated
what looked like a broad
wall of rain passing in front of
him. Brown thought he was
witnessing only a rather
heavy thunderstorm. In fact,
he was looking at the tornado
itself.
After the rain and hail had
ended, Brown drove into
town, completely unprepared
for the devastation he found.
“It was the worst ‘rain’ I’d
ever seen,” he says wryly.
With all electric power
gone and a thick layer of
cloud cover, the night was
pitch black. An eerie silence
hung over the town, as people
began to emerge from
their basements and storm
shelters. Most were in a state of shock. Says another witness:
“It was like one of those zombie movies. People were just
stumbling around with this blank look on their faces.”
Doherty tells of one victim who ran up to people pleading for
help to get his family out of their basement. When rescuers
hurried to the scene, they found the door to the shelter opened
easily, the interior was intact, and those inside were safe and
sound.
Other people sobbed quietly or picked listlessly through the
rubble. Southern Plains employee Alan Allison remembers that
the emergency flashers of many of the smashed and crumpled
cars were blinking silently, adding to the creepy atmosphere.
Brown picked his way through the rubble to the house of his
friend Norman Voltz, to find that Voltz and his wife, Bev, had
been injured when their house collapsed. Bev was seriously
hurt; they used duct tape to strap her to a door, put her in the
back of a pickup and went looking for one of the ambulances
they were told was waiting in the center of town.
On the way, they picked up two young men, who helped hold
the injured woman and cleared rubble for the vehicle’s passage.
The ambulance took Mrs. Voltz to a hospital in Dodge
City, 50 miles away. Unfortunately, her injuries were too severe,
and she died soon afterward.
Along its 22-mile path of destruction, the tornado took 14
lives. But its toll could have been much worse. It hit at about 10
p.m. on a Friday night, and most people were home watching
television when the warning sirens sounded, thus receiving
plenty of notice that the storm was about to hit and giving them
time to seek shelter. If the tornado had hit earlier in the day,
with people out and about, or, especially, later at night, with
everybody sleeping, deaths might have numbered in the hundreds.
Heeding the alarm
In his farmhouse several miles north of town, 70-year-old
Kenny Keen, a member of Haviland’s Farmers Cooperative Co.,
heard the tornado warnings on TV. He sought refuge with his
wife in the basement at 10:15, after predictions that the tornado
would pass nearby at 10:34. “By 10:34 it wasn’t here,” he
remembers. “And every time another minute went by, I’d say
‘It’s gonna miss us.’”
After a while, Keen decided it was a false alarm. “I’m gonna
go to bed!” he told his wife. But she was more cautious. “She
said, ‘Don’t you go up there ‘til 11… wait a minute. My ears are
popping!” He shakes his head. “Then, boom! The roof came off.”
The twister destroyed the house, a horse stable and uprooted or destroyed a number of trees. Keen’s two horses, however,
survived unscathed. Three weeks later, as he was saddling
one of the horses, he looked down and spotted a brand-new,
$100 bill he had put under his wife’s jewelry box, intended as a
gift for his grandson’s high-school graduation. “If the horse
hadn’t backed up, I’d never have seen it,” he chuckles.
A little closer to town, Southern Plains member Ki Gamble,
his wife Kim and their two small children had a stroke of luck.
“The house shook, the earth shook and we could hear
Greensburg disappearing,” he says. However, their 100-yearold
farm house — built with extra reinforcement against high
winds — survived the storm almost intact.
The rest of their durable assets didn’t do so well. Their
grain bins, outbuildings — including a large barn — two pickups,
two semi-tractors, two trailers and a bull wagon were all
totaled. Ironically, their combine, which was being serviced in
town, survived the devastation. “It’s ugly, but it still runs,”
says Gamble.
“This was shaping up to be a good year,” muses Gamble.
Corn prices were high, and the wheat crop was looking good.
Then came the storm, which not only damaged buildings and
equipment, but was part of a weather pattern bringing too
much rain. The excess moisture has made it difficult cultivate
corn and delayed the wheat harvest, in some cases leading to
degradation of the crop.
The tornado also knocked over or destroyed 420 irrigation
pivots, each costing about $50,000. Gamble says the one good
thing about the wet weather was that it has kept corn from
suffering from lack of water, giving farmers time to get their
irrigation systems repaired.
Gamble is grateful that he didn’t lose more. “I don’t want to
seem like I’m complaining,” he’s quick to say, “especially
when some people lost everything.” He also praises the help
he has received from the Kansas Farm Bureau, with which he
was insured.
Helping each other
Around the area, people quickly and generously came to
each other’s aid.
About 10 miles east of Greensburg in Haviland, employees
of Farmers Cooperative
Co. jumped into
action. Some immediately
drove to the site
of the disaster to help
any way they could.
The manager of the
co-op’s newly
acquired service station
opened the facility
at midnight, ready
to serve any vehicles
that might need fuel.
The co-op also loaded
and sent a tanker
trunk to Greensburg to
provide fuel for vehicles
involved in the rescue effort.
A friend of the Keens offered them an empty furnished
house, saying they could stay there as long as they liked.
Many others in the area have taken storm victims into their
homes, in many cases people they’d never met. Local church
groups have organized much of the aid, offering shelter and
food to whoever needs it, and the Kansas Cooperative Council
set up an emergency aid fund.
Brown was preparing to move into his “dream house” in
Greensburg, bought only days before the storm. “I lost it,” he
says, “but at least I had my other house to go home to.” That
house, in a nearby village, is also temporarily sheltering two
families put out by the storm.
People in Greensburg are especially complimentary of
organizations such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army,
both of which were quickly on the scene and are still providing
vital services. And a number of smaller groups have
showed up to help with the gargantuan cleanup effort, which
will take many months. Many of their members stand out
because of the brightly colored tee shirts they wear.
Some doubt that the town can make a full recovery from
the damage. Brown points out that most of the low-income
housing won’t be available even after rebuilding, although a
USDA Rural Development-funded multi-family housing facility
survived the storm and was repaired with agency funds. “We
might lose half our population because of that,” he says.
“And then, would the grocery store come back?”
Doherty now stays with his son in Bucklin, about 20 miles
to the west. He says the co-op he works for “has been wonderful,”
with financial and other help. But, he says, “the
worst thing is not knowing what I’m going to do.” His wife
worked at the local ALCO variety store, which was destroyed
by the storm, and it’s not known if it will be rebuilt.
Worst of all, he says, his house insurance covered only
what he owed on the mortgage, and plans to put in a traffic
bypass call for his property to be condemned. “I guess I’ll
just have to take whatever they’ll give me for it,” he says ruefully.
“I’m starting all over again with nothing. I’m back at 18
years old, only I’m 62.
