In the breadbasket of Kansas, where rusty, rotating oil wells pump silently in fields of wheat, corn and alfalfa, a clean energy revolution has taken root. Deep in the Bible Belt, it’s an unlikely place for something so new, a frontier town where pioneers battled nature’s dangerous elements to carve out a new life.
But tragedy and adversity can lead to positive change, and that’s what happened to the prairie town of Greensburg. Four years ago, a ferocious 1.7 mile wide EF-5 tornado packing 200 mile-an-hour winds roared through this sleepy agricultural community of 1,500. In the flash of an eye, it destroyed 95 percent of the buildings, leaving 11 dead among huge heaps of twisted metal, brick and wood.
But you wouldn’t know it now. Instead wind turbines rise high above the prairie, rotating like massive pinwheels powered by the jet stream blowing west to east out of the Rockies. Gleaming cutting-edge buildings have popped up near Main Street like high-tech prairie dogs peaking out of their holes. It was all part of a rebuilding plan that came together with amazing speed, as my NRDC colleague Kaid Benfield noted in this blog three years ago.
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