Greensburg GreenTown

March 3, 2008 6:03 PM

Greensburg, Kansas was destroyed by an F5 tornado in May, 2007. The city council and Governor Sebelius decided to rebuild as a "green" town while Leonardo DiCaprio produces a 13-part series for Discovery channel affiliated (this flier is showing up around Greensburg now) Planet Green in June.

I just ran across this today and thought it was an interesting follow up to questions in the thread I posted about Larry Schwarm's pictures of the aftermath of the tornado a few months back.

posted by sleepy pete (8 comments total)

Good post, sleepy pete. This has been all over the news here in Kansas. Of course there is rampant skepticism by the usual contingent of people who like to criticize anything environmental as being part of the "Liberal Agenda," but I'm hoping the work done in Greensburg will serve as a shining example to other towns, both big and small.
posted by amyms at 7:27 PM on March 3

I'm glad the Big Well made it through okay. Love me some Kansas, man.
posted by padraigin at 8:00 PM on March 3

Elites in Liberal have an agenda?
posted by raysmj at 8:42 PM on March 3

The agenda: To get everyone to eat pancakes.

Anyway, nice post. The Holy Cross neighborhood (a National Register Historic District) in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward has made a goal of going green as well.
posted by raysmj at 8:47 PM on March 3

amyms, thanks for saying that. I read some viewpoints that were negative, but it did seem to be a lot of the same stuff I've always heard from Kansans about government. I don't understand why more farmers, especially in the western part of the state, don't stop planting and just create wind farms.

raysmj: Liberal's pancake race has nothing on my old hometown's Bean Night. Let the gas jokes commence. And man, I remember most of the people that they talk to in that article and I'm surprised they're still around. Also, thanks for the bit about Holy Cross. I've been wondering if anything like this would happen in New Orleans.
posted by sleepy pete at 9:31 PM on March 3

interesting! as a former Kansas resident, it's always nice to hear KS news...
posted by pril at 10:14 PM on March 3

This is great news. The new buildings are being built to LEED Platinum requirements, which are a pretty exacting set of standards (PDF link) that govern just about everything down to how far away the new building materials can come from.

My alma mater built a really impressive field station to LEED standards a few years ago, and I was lucky enough to take a tour of it. If the new buildings in Greensburg are half as good, I'll be amazed -- and from the looks of things, they'll be about twice as good.
posted by hifiparasol at 10:29 PM on March 3

Nice post, sleepy pete.

Lawrence.com did a story on a group of anarchists who went down to Greensburg last summer to help. And here's the anarchists' take.

Some more photos here and here.

I've got my fingers crossed that the rebuilding will go as they intend. The state legislature wasn't so friendly towards environmental issues before the issue of the coal plants came up, and is probably less so now.
posted by cog_nate at 1:52 PM on March 4