Holiday in Greensburg

Dave Strano stood at the edge of a crowd on Massachusetts with a bright-red clown nose on his face, admiring his reflection in a restaurant window. Around him, a dozen young Lawrence residents loaded shovels and work gloves and yellow boxes of Tastee-Os cereal into a green-and-purple school bus with the anarchist flag pasted above the windshield. Aware that his fellow travelers were bound for a place they weren’t welcome, Strano joked that the ripped foam nose he’d found in a dumpster behind Jayhawk Towers might be enough to fool an army of police officers.

“That’ll get me into Greensburg,” he announced sarcastically.

The joke earned cautious laughter from the other members of Kansas Mutual Aid, an anarchist collective that organizes anti-war protests, tends community gardens and advocates on behalf of prisoners. The group was about to pull away from the Solidarity Revolutionary Center and Radical Bookstore to spend Memorial Day weekend in central Kansas, removing debris from the EF-5 tornado that chewed through Greensburg and spit out its contents across miles of surrounding fields. The week before Memorial Day, Strano and four others were escorted out of the ravaged city limits and told they’d be arrested if they returned.

Joe Carr, a member, says the group mobilized after the May 4 storm. Unlike countless church groups and individ- ual do-gooders, Kansas Mutual Aid approached the disaster from a political perspective. Its members were concerned about residents’ human rights and civil liberties in a newly militarized city. They worried about the location of the prisoners in the county jail. And they predicted an inept state-run cleanup.

On May 12, four KMA members drove to Greensburg to survey the situation. Carr says the relief activities were incoherent, but the heavy police and National Guard presence reminded him of his trip to Fallujah, Iraq. As the four Lawrence residents walked the streets looking for work — one of the women with a shaved head and the men wearing long hair — a squad car from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department followed them.

Soon, they pitched in to help an elderly couple clear soaked furniture from their flooded and mildewed basement. “On our way out, they said, ‘Thank you so much. Come back and bring 50 more,'” Carr says.

The next week, they returned to a less friendly reception. They rolled through the police checkpoint and headed to a makeshift government nerve center — a small area surrounding Greensburg’s brick courthouse that was packed with police cars from around the state, Federal Emergency Management Agency campers and white trailers that housed the temporary City Hall and municipal services. That’s where relief workers were supposed to coordinate with the disaster officials — and it’s where the four were confronted by Ty Moeder, an officer with the Olathe Police Department.

KMA members claim that Moeder told them to take their hands out of their pockets and move to a side street to avoid making a scene. Moeder said they were a security threat because of their affiliation with anarchism. With a dozen law-enforcement officials backing him up, he told them that they were not welcome in the city and would be arrested if they came back. After Moeder took pictures of their vehicle, the group was escorted out of Greensburg by five squad cars with lights flashing.

Sgt. Mike Butaud, spokesman for the Olathe Police Department, didn’t deny the interaction but declined to comment on the incident. He referred questions to the Kansas Attorney General’s Office, saying the OPD was “taking a backseat to the state.”

[page]

Ashley Anstaett, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Paul Morrison, said law-enforcement officials are empowered to “request people leave the area if they believe they are a security threat or disturbing the rebuilding process.” She couldn’t cite the specific reason for the activists’ expulsion, though. “I’m assuming they were doing something that law enforcement believed was causing problems,” she told the Pitch.

Fewer than 48 hours after being kicked out of Greensburg, the group reconvened in a muggy backroom of Lawrence’s Solidarity Center, recruiting as many volunteers as could fit in the KMA’s painted school bus for a trip the next weekend. Though they wouldn’t be able to drive into the city and be directed to a homeowner in need, they planned to find work outside the city limits.

As rain fell near Greensburg on Saturday morning, the group met Bill Roenbaugh on a dirt road on his sprawling property near Belpre. The neatly dressed farmer stopped his white Toyota SUV at the edge of a field lined with the remnants of power lines. He pointed to his left and said a house up that way had collapsed, killing one man and putting the man’s wife in the hospital. In the other direction, his neighbor’s home was battered as well. He said scores of volunteers had driven out to offer help and he asked the KMA members if they were part of a specific group.

One answered quickly, telling Roenbaugh that the group was from “the Kansas City area” and that the Kansas Mutual Aid title sums up the group’s work: helping fellow citizens in need. Nobody mentioned the group’s affinity for anarchy.

The KMA members didn’t know much about Roenbaugh either — the Edwards County Emergency Management agency had sent them to him. But they spread out along a field of 3-inch-tall corn plants and began walking the rows like a search party. After less than an hour of picking up thigh-sized tree limbs and long metal irrigation poles, they realized that this wasn’t the type of work they had in mind. Roenbaugh has 10,000 acres — so much land that his 17-year-old hired hand said he didn’t know how to navigate it all.

“Hey, John, how do you like working for the rich farmer?” Strano said into one of the group’s walkie-talkies.

Members sat on a disjointed irrigation line to discuss their concerns. They weren’t happy about working for a large-scale farmer who appeared to have the economic resources to help himself. But they didn’t want to alienate a local contact who could get them in touch with residents in real need. As the day progressed, the discussion turned into an argument. That didn’t stop their work, though. In the afternoon, they hunkered down for more than an hour with simple hand tools, hacking through three big trees that had crashed onto a dirt access road on Roenbaugh’s property. It was after 6 p.m. when they called it a day.

That night, as the sunburned activists prepared pasta and corn-on-the-cob in the kitchen at the United Methodist Church in nearby Kinsley, they found out that they’d been right about Roenbaugh. When the church’s caretaker, Crystal Obie, popped in to make sure they were settling in, she instantly recognized Roenbaugh’s name. The anarchists had spent all day working for the richest guy in the county.

A handful, however, had managed not to. While most of the KMA members worked in Roenbaugh’s field, a few others, who hadn’t been banned the week before, drove 30 miles south to Greensburg and passed through an eastern checkpoint marked with flashing squad cars and manned by Kansas State Troopers. They spoke with bored-looking young AmeriCorps workers, who sat in a red-and-white tent full of new shovels. After some confusion, an AmeriCorps volunteer gave them the number for a small farm just north of the city. Before the Lawrence activists headed to Ki Gamble’s property, though, they wandered through the wreckage in town.

[page]

On the city’s east side, houses were still standing, propped up at odd angles like battered skeletons with their guts poured out. Nearly every home was marked with a bright-blue V for vacant, but the voices of past residents echoed in spray-painted messages. “Opal OK, went to hospital.” “Tim! Survived?” “Do Not Touch. Do Not Doze!”

Except for the subtle rumble of construction equipment on the other side of town, the neighborhood was silent. A light breeze tossed strips of plastic and shards of fabric into the air like small birds. No one was working on clearing the mangled homes. The only visible sign of progress was a plume of gray smoke just to the east, where thousands of tons of debris were being burned.

On the main drag of U.S. Highway 54, the business district looked like a derelict lumberyard minced into piles of splintered wood. On the west side of town, houses had been stripped to their foundations, with huge holes evoking a massive meteor shower. By the time the group hit the western checkpoint, they decided the Gamble farm could wait until the next morning.

As their bus neared his farm on Sunday, Gamble, with a shaggy handlebar mustache and wearing a blue flannel shirt, bounced over the uneven dirt road on his Honda Fourtrax ATV. He escorted the bus past his family’s modest but proud farmhouse, where the windows had been blown out but spray paint boasted “100 Years and Still Going Strong.”

Gamble stopped at the edge of a field already heaped with a pile of trash as big as a double-wide trailer. His farm is near the outskirts of the city, and the storm had flung huge amounts of debris onto his fields. He told the group not to worry about smaller items; he asked them to look instead for splintered two-by-fours, twisted metal shards and boards with nails sticking out — the kind of stuff that would monkey-wrench an expensive tractor.

“If we tried to get everything, we’d be out here for three years,” he said.

Pushing through knee-high grass, the Lawrence crew collected shingles and wood scraps and soggy insulation. They found crumpled recipes and receipts for recently purchased tractors, old wedding photos and inspirational knickknacks with slogans such as “When in Doubt, Look Up.” There was a ball cap advertising “Hookers Lumber Yard.” Someone found a stash of porn magazines. They debated whether a torn $50 bill would still be accepted as legal tender but agreed right away that Gamble should be the one to find out.

After three hours, they broke for a lunch of Pop-Tarts, leftover pasta and seaweed crackers they’d scored from a dumpster back in Lawrence. They still had a muggy afternoon of fieldwork ahead of them and a five-hour trip in a bus that smelled like the manure-rich mud that had splattered the sides of the vehicle over the weekend. But they were still down with the cause.

Strano floated the idea of staying an extra day to make more contacts. Carr was determined to find and visit the FEMA trailer park where some Greensburg residents had taken refuge.

[page]

They knew Gamble’s field would still be littered with Fiberglas and mangled paperback books when they left later that afternoon. But that was OK.

They may not be welcome past the police checkpoints, but they would be back.