Greensburg mayor to share town’s ‘green’ tale at Elgin conference

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

The residents of Greensburg, Kan., turned the aftermath of a terrible tornado that devastated their town four years ago into an opportunity to rebuild as a model of environmental efficiency.

It’s a move that Greensburg Mayor Bob Dixson said should be seen as transcending politics and for the greater good.

“We’re being stewards of the land, as our ancestors taught us,” Dixson said. “People should live within their means and not be wasteful. New technologies can allow us to do so.”

Dixson will be a featured speaker at GreenTown: The Future of Community, on Thursday, April 28, at The Centre in downtown Elgin. The sustainability conference is designed for community leaders, public officials, municipal staffs and others interested in environmental issues.

Also scheduled to talk are Dr. Richard Jackson, author, chair of the School of Health at UCLA, and former head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Randall Arendt, landscape planner and author, who works at Greener Prospects, an environmentally focused consulting firm and whose latest book is “Envisioning Better Communities: Seeing More Options, Making Wiser Choices.”

Devastation and hope

These days, Dixson is on the road, telling his town’s tale more than he ever imagined he would be.

“People are fascinated by the story, and I think that’s because it’s one with a message of hope,” Dixson said last week while on a layover at O’Hare International Airport on his way to Philadelphia.

The night of May 4, 2007, Greensburg — the Kiowa County seat and a town of about 1,500 residents — was hit by a tornado wider than the town itself, with winds measuring 205 mph, making it one of the most powerful tornadoes on record. It left 11 local people dead, destroyed about 95 percent of the town, and damaged most of the rest of its buildings.

That included the two-story Victorian house where Dixson and his wife lived. Dixson and his family have lived in Greensburg since 1985, and at one time he was the town’s postmaster.

“We lost everything,” Dixson said.

Among the dead were two neighbors.

Not wallowing in the devastation, Dixson said that within 24 hours of the storm, community and state leaders and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) representatives were meeting to discuss rebuilding. That discussion quickly turned to doing the work in environmentally sound and energy-efficient ways. The town’s motto became “Greener, Stronger, Better.”

The effort drew the attention of activist Daniel Wallach of Stafford County, 35 miles northeast of Greensburg, who formed Greensburg GreenTown. The nonprofit’s website states that the “grass-roots community-based organization has worked side-by-side with city and county officials, business owners and local residents to incorporate sustainable principles into their rebuilding process. We serve as an educational resource for the community, a conduit through which donations can be distributed, and a representative to those outside the community who are interested in the Green Initiative.”

Discovery documentary

It also drew interest from the Discovery Channel. According to reports, the network had been looking for a town along the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that it could sponsor to rebuild in green ways but found no takers for the project.

Greensburg leaders took up the offer — a $400,000 investment in the town that included actor Leonardo DiCaprio making “Eco-Town,” a documentary-style show about the work under way in Greensburg for Discovery’s Planet Green channel.

This all led to Greensburg partnering with a variety of companies, obtaining green-related grants and becoming what Dixson noted is a living laboratory for environmental technologies in south-central Kansas.

According to published reports, partners in this experiment include AT&T, Sun Chips, Kodak, Clorox, Office Depot, Sears, Mother Earth News, Honda, General Motors and a number of smaller tech firms. A group of local business people formed Kiowa County United, a nonprofit that raised more than $1.5 million to build a shopping center.

Dixson said that in all, between 20 and 30 organizations have donated time, labor and/or money to the cause.

Other projects include the Kiowa County Memorial Hospital, a 15-bed, $25 million critical-care facility; a $2.9 million city hall; a $3.4 million business incubator building; a county courthouse refurbished for more than $5 million; and a $50 million schools campus.

John Deere is putting up a wind farm south of Greensburg. And plans are under way to rebuild the Twilight Theater and Big Well Museum. Prior to the green work, the well was Greensburg’s most famous attraction — a 109-foot-deep hand-dug hole dating to the late 1800s whose purpose was to provide water for railroad steam engines.

Green homes, too

Homeowners are being encouraged to rebuild green, too. Dixson and his wife now have a ranch-style place, with features that include strategically placed windows to take advantage of passive solar heat; awnings; extra insulation; LED lighting; and an on-demand water heater. These moves have meant energy bills 60 percent less than at the couple’s last home.

Their experience is part of an education process showing “you don’t have to spend a lot to be green,” Dixson said. “For people to adapt to these changes, they have to be financially sustainable. Our motto here is, ‘We’re as green as we can be with the green we have.’ ”

The attention has meant tourists as well as new residents have been drawn to the town, and some former dwellers also have moved back home. Those include one of Dixson’s grown children, who has returned to Greensburg with her own family, helping bring the population close to 900 now.

The attention has included a State of the Union nod from President Barack Obama and an accolade from the United Nations. It also has at times turned his town into a “fish bowl,” but Dixson said residents have become more comfortable dealing with the media.

To that point, while being interviewed for this story, Dixson was on his way to speak to a convention for U.S. Chambers of Commerce and to receive another award for the town, this one a sustainable community honor from Siemens, which incidentally has two wind turbine plants in Elgin.

Dixson said he has no canned speech for occasions such as the upcoming event in Elgin. Rather, he touches on how his community came together with a common cause, for the need to get past terms and the idea that being green is “way out there,” and to conservation values.

Dixson said it can be boiled down to one word: “Legacy.”