The Greensburg rebuild
After a tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, I led the construction teams and brought in donated materials from national suppliers.
An EF5 tornado hit Greensburg, Kansas in May 2007 and erased ninety-five percent of the town. The community chose to rebuild green, aiming every public building at LEED Platinum, and I went in to help. I ran the preconstruction and construction teams and coordinated the green redesign. What actually made the rebuild possible, though, was persuading national manufacturers to donate the materials. A town that small could never have paid full price for that build.
Supplier by supplier, I negotiated more than thirty million dollars of donated materials at wholesale value, until the program had what it needed. Probably over fifty manufacturers joined, and many were outside building products. Rebuilding a city means needs in automotive, clothing, food trucks and food stands too. With the city wiped out, lots of vendors wanted free press, and we took everyone who wanted in. DuPont led the sponsors, and Discovery Channel and Planet Green covered the story.
I came away believing that a disaster rebuild is a sales job before it is a construction job. The program needed someone able to walk into a manufacturer's office and explain why that brand deserved to be on national television beside thirteen homes and a set of commercial buildings climbing out of the rubble. The biggest lever on a project like this remains the negotiation nobody sees, not the framing everyone photographs.
Story details
| Project | Greensburg, Kansas |
|---|---|
| Type | High-stakes save |
| Firm telling | on the Common Ground wiki |