A Visit to Greensburg

Earlier this month I visited Greensburg, Kan., and toured a few of its many green buildings. It was a great trip, and you can see more photos from my visit in this Greensburg photo gallery.

Background. Greensburg is the rural Midwestern town that was struck by an EF5 tornado on May 4, 2007. The storm was 1.7 miles wide — it killed 11 people and destroyed most of the town.

After the storm, the people of Greensburg made a commitment to rebuilding the town as a model green community. That effort is already well underway, and you can even watch its progress on TV. A Greensburg TV series on the Planet Green network is following the progress of rebuilding. The third season begins filming soon.

My visit. Mother Earth News is based in Topeka, Kan., so Greensburg is relatively close to where we’re located — about a 4 hour drive — but this was my first visit to the town. I took a walking tour guided by volunteers from Greensburg Greentown, a community-based nonprofit devoted to helping Greensburg build green.

So what does Greensburg look like these days? Well, there’s still a lot of evidence of the storm, even more than two years out. As our tour guides explained, Greensburg used to be locally known for its trees, but now most of the trees are gone. You can see from one end of town to the other — the view is wide open. Most of the storm debris is gone, too, but there are still remnants of many buildings — a wall here, some steps there. But already many homes and buildings have been rebuilt, and many more are under construction.

There are nine different buildings on the walking tour of Greensburg (some you can go into, and others are just visible from the street). While there are many green features to see, I was struck by one recurring theme: concrete. Many of the buildings are being built with insulated concrete form walls (ICFs). In fact, ICF construction makes a lot of sense for Greensburg. Not only does it provide excellent insulation, the buildings are also structurally strong, and therefore very resistant to storm damage. From a green standpoint, one of the disadvantages of concrete is that it takes a lot of energy to produce. But in Greensburg, there are always more opportunities to go green — in this case by recycling concrete debris from the storm. The Silo Eco-Home in Greensburg is made of precast concrete, and 35 percent of that concrete is recycled from local storm debris.