The Greensburg Tornado Disaster of 2007 | Episode 91 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:30):
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

(00:51):
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

(01:15):
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

(01:38):
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,

(02:01):
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

(02:21):
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

(02:42):
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

(03:04):
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.

(03:25):
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

(03:47):
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

(04:08):
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,

(04:29):
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.

(04:52):
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,

(05:13):
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

(05:34):
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.

(05:54):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:37):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:20):
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

(07:43):
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

(08:04):
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

(08:27):
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

(08:47):
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

(09:10):
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

(09:31):
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

(09:53):
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

(10:17):
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

(10:37):
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

(11:01):
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

(11:21):
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

(11:42):
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

(12:06):
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.

(12:30):
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,

(12:53):
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,

(13:16):
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

(13:38):
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

(14:00):
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

(14:21):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:27):
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,

(15:50):
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

(16:11):
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

(16:36):
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

(17:01):
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

(17:23):
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

(17:45):
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.

(18:08):
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

(18:29):
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

(18:50):
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,

(19:14):
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,

(19:36):
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

(19:58):
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

(20:21):
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

(20:42):
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

(21:02):
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

(21:24):
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

(21:48):
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

(22:10):
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

(22:31):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:15):
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

(23:36):
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

(23:57):
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

(24:17):
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

(24:40):
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

(25:02):
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

(25:22):
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,

(25:44):
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.

(26:05):
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

(26:28):
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

(26:49):
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

(27:12):
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

(27:32):
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.

(27:56):
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,

(28:16):
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

(28:39):
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

(29:02):
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

(29:25):
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

(29:47):
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

(30:09):
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

(30:30):
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

(30:52):
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

(31:17):
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

(31:38):
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

(32:02):
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

(32:24):
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

(32:44):
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

(33:09):
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

(33:30):
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

(33:53):
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

(34:13):
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.

(34:34):
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

(34:54):
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

(35:18):
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.

(35:39):
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

(36:02):
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.

(36:25):
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.

(36:48):
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

(37:11):
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

(37:31):
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.

(37:52):
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

(38:14):
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

(38:35):
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

(38:57):
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

(39:19):
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.

(39:39):
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.

(40:01):
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

(40:25):
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

(40:47):
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,

(41:10):
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

(41:34):
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

(41:56):
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

(42:16):
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

(42:38):
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

(43:01):
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

(43:24):
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

(43:44):
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.

(44:05):
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,

(44:28):
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,

(44:52):
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

(45:15):
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,

(45:36):
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

(45:58):
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

(46:27):
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

(46:51):
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.

(47:12):
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

(47:34):
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

(47:55):
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

(48:16):
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,

(48:38):
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

(48:58):
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

(49:20):
over your left shoulder, and now pack yourself on the back.
For the rest of the episode, you can reach out
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Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one,
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(49:41):
tell your friends. I always thank all my supporters, new
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still care, thank you so much. Now that said, to
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always take moment to ask you to consider making a

(50:02):
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

(50:24):
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

(50:45):
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.

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The Greensburg Tornado Disaster of 2007 | Episode 91

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Greensburg Tornado Disaster of 2007 | Episode 91