His advice?
“Plan. Plan. Plan. And do it as a community,” Dixson said. “Know what you are as a community. Know what your assets are. There’s no boilerplate plan, but it has to be what the community thinks.”
A drive through Greensburg reveals the fruits of the plans hatched under that circus tent. There’s a gleaming arts center defiantly named 5.4.7 in reference to the May night the storm struck, a sprawling new school with a wind turbine and bioswales designed to conserve water outside City Hall.
But not far from the environmentally friendly civic buildings and recently constructed houses are indications that not everything has gone as hoped. Entire blocks contain little more than brown grass and driveways to nowhere.
Kaye Hardinger raised her family on one of those now-empty lots. About a week after the tornado, she charmed President George W. Bush when he stopped by the wreckage of her house, joking that she’d invite him inside for coffee if only she had remembered to dust.
At first, Hardinger planned to rebuild and move back to town. But as the months passed, she said it became clear that her future was outside Greensburg city limits. She was hardly alone. About 850 people live in Greensburg today, Dixson estimates, not even two-thirds of the pre-storm total.
Rebuilding can involve a range of emotions and economic realities that send people in directions they hadn’t expected.
When a tornado hit Woodward, Okla., in April 2012, Sterling Parks rushed to help at a trailer park where three people — a father and two daughters — were later found dead. The storm struck just after midnight and knocked out the city’s sirens before they had a chance to warn of the coming danger.
After an exhausting night, the Woodward police officer returned home to find his yard filled with debris and his house badly damaged. But instead of fixating on that, Parks noticed his neighbors picking up the wreckage and cleaning the cul-de-sac.
“That was the best part,” said Parks, who had been thinking before the storm about leaving his hometown for a larger city. “There’s definitely been a lot of bonds built.”