In all her 58 years, Dea Corns had never so much as seen a tornado. Contrary to what The Wizard of Oz would have you believe, destructive tornadoes are rare on the Kansas flatlands, where the small farm town of Greensburg is located. The warning siren might have sounded briefly a few times each season, but no real damage had ever resulted. So when the wail of a siren broke the evening quiet on May 4 two years ago, Corns thought nothing of it. She'd already kicked off her high heels and traded the suit she'd worn all day at the bank for her pajamas. She and her husband, Tom, were settling in for their weekly Friday date night: takeout barbecue and a rented movie.
But the tornado siren continued to wail for 20 minutes. When the Cornses switched over to the television, a newscaster warned in a tight, fearful voice that a huge twister of unprecedented power was coming up from Oklahoma and that anyone in its path needed to take cover immediately. The tornado was heading straight for Greensburg and it was moving quickly.
Tom told Dea to change into jeans and boots, just in case. They went through the house, pulling favorite paintings off the walls and gathering their collection of cut glass as they moved toward the basement. First, the electricity went out. Then, just before 10 p.m., their ears began to pop. "It's here," Tom said.
The funnel cloud nearly two miles wide, with winds topping 200 mph slammed into the town, sounding like a giant helicopter, its blades slicing through roofs and walls.
Melinda Kendall, then a 37-year-old substitute teacher, waited in a friend's basement with her husband, Mick, and two children. They'd fled so quickly, she'd forgotten her wedding ring and her shoes. When the lights went out, the adults shoved the kids under a desk and tried to cover themselves with sofa cushions. Then, one by one, the windows began to explode.
A few blocks away, Jill Eller, 47 at the time, shouted, "I love you guys," to her husband and teenage daughter, clinging to them in a bedroom closet. She felt the wall against her back expand and contract like an accordion as the storm tore into her house.
Cassie Kirby, clerk of the town's school board, huddled in her basement, where she'd pulled a crib mattress around her daughter, who was then 4, to protect her from what was about to hit. Above the wind she could hear an eerie, rhythmic screech, made, she learned later, by nails being sucked out of the walls. Kirby, who's now 45, locked eyes with her husband, Troy, and thought, "This is how I'm going to die."
Then it was over. The tornado had lasted about 15 minutes. As townspeople began to emerge into the starless night, with only the beams of their flashlights to guide them, no one guessed the full extent of the devastation. It wasn't until the next morning that they got a good look at the barren moonscape that used to be their town. Ninety-five percent of the buildings had been flattened or had vanished completely. When the school bus brought Jill Eller's older daughter, Jordan, and 26 other students back that afternoon from an overnight trip, only one still had a house.
Century-old trees had been yanked from the ground like weeds. Cars had cartwheeled over the three-story Kiowa County Courthouse, leaving streaks of auto paint on the roof. A perfect silhouette of football bleachers marked where they'd crashed through the side of the high school or what remained of it. Eleven people were dead, among them Eller's close friend, Beverly Volz, who was crushed by a falling beam.
The National Guard ordered everyone to leave, sealing the town's borders. As Dea Corns drove away, still wearing the jeans and boots she'd pulled on 20 hours before, "in case," she began to weep. Everything they had their home, the Greensburg State Bank, which Tom's family had been a part of since 1924, their entire lives was in this community. But her grief soon gave way to resolve. "We'll just have to put it back together," she thought. "We'll find a way."
And that's how this small American town began its journey from destruction to rebirth, how its residents found the grit and the vision to transform disaster into hard-earned triumph.
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