Greensburg is gone; its future, unknown

Is this what the future of climate change will bring us? How many more towns will we lose, I wonder?

Wow. Maybe middle America will start to understand what NOLA went through.

Kansas.com
| 05/06/2007 | Greensburg is gone; its future, unknown

GREENSBURG – This sun-baked High Plains town no longer has a grade school, a high school, a City Hall, a hospital, a water tower, a fire station, a business district or a main street.
It has people, but all 1,400 of them live elsewhere today. The homes they kept, the rooms where they were born, where they grew old together, now lie in millions of pieces, some of them as small as matchsticks. Tatters and shards of Greensburg flew for miles across the shortgrass and sage and yucca outside town on Friday night. Their branches now hold the shreds of housing insulation, pieces of tin, pieces of twisted roofing, crumpled family photographs, torn documents, and bits and pieces of belongings.
The Kiowa County courthouse still stands. The grain elevator still stands. The water tower, as a highway patrol trooper said, “is not just down — it is completely destroyed.”
“This is so surreal,” city administrator Steve Hewitt said. “I don’t know what to expect tomorrow. I’m worried about two weeks from now, when the volunteers go home. I think we have a tough road ahead of us.”
The day after
Greensburg has 40 National Guardsmen guarding its streets.
There is a curfew.
About 200 people were expected to stay in three shelters Saturday night in Haviland and Mullinville, according to the American Red Cross Midway-Kansas Chapter.
While townspeople looked on from afar Saturday, a second powerful storm rolled through, spawning more tornadoes and pouring inches of rain on windblown possessions.
The wind that took Greensburg away came in a wedge tornado nearly a mile and a half wide. Ninety-five percent of Greensburg took off with it.