Word: tornadoes
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...Tornado that hit Greensburg on May 4 took its time, rolling up Main Street like it was on a Sunday stroll to church. Ron Shank, owner of the Kansas town's General Motors dealership, hid with his wife beneath a quilt in their basement, but they heard the storm rip their home from its foundations. Marvin George, a pastor at the Baptist church, took shelter in his closet. "We just knelt and prayed," he says. "I wasn't scared until the next morning, when I saw the carnage...
...tornado measured 5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest possible rating, and it left hardly a single wall standing. "Big strong men looked at what was left and were damn near in tears," remembers Lonnie McCollum, then the town's mayor. More than 1,000 people--at least two-thirds of Greensburg's population--were left homeless. Despite the help that poured in during the following weeks, residents feared that their town had suffered a deathblow. Greensburg's population had been declining for years. Jobs had grown scarce, and few in the shrinking high school classes stayed after graduation...
...posed in a cute blue dress with a short skirt that shows off her indestructibly fabulous gams; her smile is so electric it could light every casino on the Strip. A donkey wanders past, seemingly unimpressed, as, in the distance, a storm gathers strength. It morphs into a tornado, sending croupiers and chorines whizzing across the skyscape like Miss Gulch over Kansas. The door to an airborne Port-A-Potty swings open and an Elvis impersonator falls out. Now the video images give way to a crowd of real people on stage: three backup singers (the Staggering Harlettes...
...tornado had measured EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, the highest possible rating, and it left hardly a single wall standing. "I could only think of Hiroshima," remembers Lonnie McCollum, then the town's mayor. "Big strong men looked at what was left and were damn near in tears." Over 1,000 people - more than two-thirds of the town's population - were left homeless. Despite the help that poured in over the following weeks from FEMA, from charities and from nearby towns, residents feared their town had suffered a deathblow. Like many rural Midwestern towns, Greensburg had been losing...
...Still, green or not, for some Greensburg will never heal. Former mayor Lonnie McCollum, one of the first to raise the idea of building green, quit his post three weeks after the tornado, citing exhaustion, and eventually moved with his wife to the neighboring town of Pratt. On recent Friday, McCollum spoke wistfully of the town in which he had lived his entire life. He can't let Greensburg go, but he can't return, either. "We had a Norman Rockwell existence," the 62-year-old says. "For me, it's completely gone. There's nothing out there...