Partying with FEMA

I'm working in mixed-reverse chronological order on my blog backlog here--I also need to fully cover the Badlands camping trip two weeks ago and the Tep house clue tour; this post covers last week.

I spent the end of last week in Greensburg, KS--the town that got wiped out by the tornado this spring. It was pretty amazing to see the damage--rows and rows of empty lots which used to be a neighborhood (some houses were even condemned down to their foundations, which were dug up); big stretches of misshapen trees (all the larger branches had been ripped off, so just the smaller ones are left, in one direction from the trunk); the FEMA-town of rows and rows of trailers.


Incidentally, if you're wondering if it is a bad idea to live in trailers in this part of the country, FEMA has addressed the tornado shelter problem by berming shipping containers a short run from the trailers--a pretty slick solution. (yay shipping containers!)


Anyway, the reason why I was there was that my company has been asked, under the government program we work for, to promote energy efficient housing (when folks are rebuilding). So we spent three days putting together a mock-up of an energy-efficient, durable, and resource-efficient wall that uses many of the techniques currently used in construction, thus minimizing the retraining required by the available trades.


It was a pretty good gig--although we spent two long days sweltering in 80-90 F with humidity. I was personally surprised--I always thought of Kansas as being dry and flat, but it's close enough to the Gulf coast (i.e., one state above Oklahoma) that it was definitely humid in September.

In order to build this wall, we spent the first day buying supplies in Wichita--there's still pretty limited hardware stores out there, and we wanted to get everything at once to save time. Fortunately, we found a rental company that has Chevy Silverado full size pickups in their inventory, and we put it to work. Totally rockin':


It did a spectacular job of hauling all our supplies, plus keeping all our tools locked up in the rear of the cab. It was kinda fun to drive that rig around--you get used to the size pretty quickly. If I ever have a place for another vehicle that spends 29 out of 30 days sitting in the driveway, a used beater truck that can hold a 4x8 sheet of plywood flat in the deck would be pretty fun. However, my coworker and I amused ourselves as we took wallowing corners around parking lots, yodeling, "Canyonero!" to ourselves. ("12 yards long and two lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride.")

I was a bit worried about culture clashes during my visits with the locals. To wit, the Wikipedia article on Greensburg states:

As of the U.S. Census in 2000, there were 1,574 people, 730 households, and 453 families residing in the city. ... The racial makeup of the city was 97.01% White, 0.83% Native American, 0.06% Asian, 1.02% from other races...

Yeah, you can calculate it out: 0.06% Asian = 1 Asian person (or rather 0.944). Interesting to note that I doubled the Asian population of the town while I was there.

However, I didn't have much of a chance to talk to the locals, so it wasn't much of an issue--we just worked straight through. One amusing event--it happened to be Homecoming during our trip, and the parade went right by our mockup. They had the usual marching bands, football team, fire trucks, etc.--but farm machinery was a new one to me:


Note that this isn't meant in the vein of urban hipster snarkery--I think it's totally neat that they include it in the parade--it's just that I've never experienced that before, and the surprise factor was funny. I think it might be due to the fact that the John Deere dealer might be a prominent local citizen, or something like that.

Anyway, flew back on Saturday, and enjoyed half a weekend.