Greensburg, Kansas

I was interested in Dan Barry´s article on Greensburg, Kansas because I drove through their last week. 3 months ago, it was just another county seat in western Kansas. Then, a tornado slammed through it and completly destroyed it. Everything. I just happened upon it last week in the first part of my move to Texas. I was totally speechless. The place is just gone. A few of the older buildings with thicker walls are sort of standing. The east side of town escaped most damage. But the center of town is demolished. This was the first real natural disaster I had ever seen. Let me tell you, it lived up to the name. Absolutely amazing.

Barry´s bigger question is whether the town will survive. The answer is almost certainly no. Now, it is the county seat so presumably something will be there. But on the Great Plains, it doesn´t take anything nearly as damaging as a 2 mile wide tornado to send a town into decline. Greensburg was already suffering from a declining population, especially among the young. Like much of the Plains, western Kansas has seen its population consistenly decline for nearly 100 years now. There´s not much left out there. Some towns are now gone completely. Others are barely hanging on. The only influx of population there on much of the Plains, and certainly in western Kansas, comes from Latin American workers coming north to labor in meatpacking. Outside of that, zilch.

The Great Plains are dying and I´m not sure what will bring them back. Probably nothing. Most of it is far from any large cities, from any major economic activity, or from the nation´s major social trends. Frankly, it´s not a place where many people should be living. It´s sad that Greensburg, which advertised having the world´s largest hand-dug well, should disappear in this way. But it was heading toward death anyway.