The Resilience of a Small Town in Kansas
Disaster psychology from Tornado Alley.
Updated May 27, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
On May 4, 2007, at 9:54 p.m., an EF5 tornado over 1.7 miles wide with winds over 205 miles per hour hit Greensburg, Kansas. The small rural town with a population of about 1,300 was leveled. The tornado took about a dozen lives and destroyed 95 percent of the town, including homes, businesses, and government buildings. The sirens went off approximately 15 minutes before the tornado hit, but there was no mechanism to prevent the disaster. Put yourself in the shoes of the residents of Greensburg: What do you do when your plans and your way of life and everything you know is destroyed overnight? What do you do as an individual, a business, a government, or a community?
The importance of social support in the wake of such a traumatic event cannot be understated. The term "social support" refers to a broadly defined construct encompassing individuals’ perceptions of being loved and cared for. Social support is a vital cushion to mitigate the impact of traumatic events. Social support is associated with lower levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and typically contributes to faster and more robust recovery after exposure to trauma (Evans, 2012). We can do much as a society to mitigate the loss of life, and perhaps there is also more we can do to improve social support in the wake of natural disasters.
Comparing Apples to Apples
Greensburg wasn’t the first small town in Kansas to be devastated by a tornado. In 1955, there was an EF5 tornado that destroyed Udall, Kansas, a town of about 500 people, killing 80 and injuring 250. Udall lost about 16 percent of its population (about 50 percent were injured), and Greensburg lost less than 1 percent. Any loss of life is tragic, but it is somewhat miraculous that a roughly equivalent tornado 52 years later, in the same region, resulted in significantly fewer lives lost.
Michael R. Smith, a researcher from Wichita, Kansas, looked at what changed from 1955 to 2007. The Udall tornado in 1955 occurred long before smartphones and modern early warning systems. In 1955, people were not constantly listening to the radio or watching television. As Smith remarks in his 2008 paper, it may have been the case that some of the victims in Udall watched the 10 o’clock news 30 minutes before the tornado arrived, but television was not ubiquitous in 1955. The people in Udall likely had zero warning and very little time to shelter.
Fast forward to 2007, about an hour and 45 minutes before the EF5 tornado hit Greensburg, Kansas, the National Weather Service’s Dodge City surveillance radar and National Lightning Detection Network recorded cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and could measure the polarity of the lightning. About an hour and 15 minutes before the tornado struck Greensburg, storm spotters had begun reporting rotating wall clouds.
According to Michael Smith’s paper:
“The tornado warning for the City of Greensburg was issued at 9:19 p.m., more than 30 minutes before the tornado struck at 9:54 p.m. The tornado siren in Greensburg was activated at approximately 9:30 p.m. Normal practice for a tornado warning was to sound the siren once for five minutes, then turn it off. Local emergency management , alarmed by the reports of damage in rural areas to the south, radar, and blow-by-blow reports from media allowed the siren to continue to sound until power was cut to the siren as the tornado arrived.”
Greensburg’s story is an example of technological progress and the improvement of societal systems. As Smith points out, if Greensburg had been subject to the same fatality rate as Udall (about 16.3 percent), 230 additional lives would’ve been lost. While the fatality rate was significantly less in Greensburg, the loss of life is still tragic, and we should strive to achieve a zero percent fatality rate in the future. Similarly, we should also foster a societal conversation about what good social support looks like in the wake of natural disasters. We should be just as focused on creating psychological social support systems as we are on creating technological support systems.
What Did Recovery Look Like for Greensburg?
Greensburg had many decisions to make together—rebuilding infrastructure, schools, and government buildings, revitalizing businesses, and creating spaces for creativity , joy, and community. One of the simplest things FEMA did to help Greensburg recover was to set up a big tent for the town to gather to talk about what to do next. The town did everything under that big tent for a while. That’s where they mourned together, and it is also where they organized themselves, including their long-term recovery plan and their sustainable master plan. In a town of about 1,300, 300 to 400 people showed up twice a week to contribute to the effort. That is a high participation rate for a local government planning effort.
“We found a way to reason together. We found a way to have common ground. We had true, honest, open dialogue. And we agreed to disagree on some issues." —Mayor Bob Dixson of Greensburg, Kansas
People weren’t just showing up to plan, though. They were also showing up to be a part of their community and to heal together. Mayor Bob Dixson described it as a discussion about values and character. What did the community care about? And what kind of community did they want to leave for their children? In his TEDx Talk years later, Mayor Dixson remarked, “Don’t let realities of today cloud your vision of tomorrow.”
The recovery of Greensburg was successful because the community responded with meaningful social support for each other. The town was committed to rebuilding together and creating a town where everyone could heal, participate, and thrive. We can learn a lot from Greensburg about community, social support, and resilience .
Dixson, Bob. “Sustainable Rebuilding Post Disaster | Bob Dixson | TEDxHerndon.” TEDx Talks , 4 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gp1PM8yjQ .
Smith, Michael R. “The Greensburg Miracle – Where there is life, there is hope.” 20th Annual Lightning Detection Conference. 2008
NOAA’s National Weather Service. Historical Kansas Tornado Statistics . www.weather.gov/ict/kstorfacts .
Evans, R. E. (2012). Police officers' experiences of social support after traumatic incidents.
Drury, J., Stancombe, J., Williams, R., Collins, H., Lagan, L., Barrett, A., French, P., & Chitsabesan, P. (2022). Survivors’ experiences of informal social support in coping and recovering after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9301776/
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Joseph Plummer, M.S., M.Ed., M.B.A. , is the author of the book Rainy Day Economics. He has three master's degrees in education, business, and natural resources.
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