A young Lyon County man is extending his temporary stay in Greensburg to help residents rebuild fire department and emergency services decimated in May 2007 by an F-5 tornado.
Mike Bess, whose family lives in the Neosho Rapids-Hartford area, had gone to Greensburg in June 2007 to help.
A firefighter and emergency medical technician, Bess had just taken up the same career as his father, Emporia Fire Department Capt. and paramedic Larry Bess. The younger Bess already is a captain on the Greensburg fire department.
Mike Bess graduated from Hutchinson Junior College with a degree in fire science before the call went out for help at Greensburg. The town’s fire department had been ravaged by the tornado and had only five firefighters available. Most of the department’s volunteers were taking care of their families’ needs, making housing arrangements, or moving to another area and unavailable.
The outside firefighters came in to fill the gap temporarily.
“It was supposed to be six months, and it’s ended up to be a year and (more) ... We’re scheduled to leave in March, actually,” Bess said.
The Greensburg fire department is up to 13 volunteers now, he said, but that staff is not yet prepared to run the department.
“Our job is to actually train all of them, get new volunteers, and get the department back in order, maintain equipment,” he said.
The department currently operates out of temporary headquarters in an old body shop. The hospital, where Bess works as an emergency medical technician, also does not have a permanent building. A groundbreaking ceremony for the new hospital was held last month, though it will not be operational for some time.
“They’re still running out of double-wide trailers,” Bess said. “They’ve got an ER and then the clinic. We do quite a bit of transfers, and the Life Team comes in a lot. We fly a lot of people out.”
Construction continues in much of Greensburg, he said, and the change in the landscape is easy to see.
Work is progressing on an “incubator building” that will house about 19 businesses temporarily.
“Once they get big enough and move out of there, they’ll build their own facilities,” he said.
The John Deere company went back into business during the summer and is preparing to move to a new “green” building east of Greensburg.
“We’re moving out to their old building,” Bess said. “That’s going to be the new fire department.”
Residential housing has been booming, he said, with about half of the former residents re-building in their home city.
When Bess arrived in Greensburg, the east and the west sides of town each held about one row of houses; in between, there was nothing. Now, he said, it’s not possible to see from one side of the town to the other.
“There’s a bunch of houses that have come up in the last year, but as far as business, they’re still doing a lot of that. ... I think once we get all the businesses in, it will be a big step for them.”
Much of the work in Greensburg has been accomplished with help from volunteers who came to the area to help for a specific amount of time, then return to their homes. One of those groups included about 100 New York City firefighters, who came for a weekend and built a barn at the fairgrounds.
They and Greensburg’s volunteer and temporary firefighters also were in a parade before a ceremony in honor of lives lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“We got to sit back and watch, didn’t get to do much with them,” said Bess who, like others, was on-duty at the hospital while the barn was being built.
“They do kind of a memorial thing for 9/11 every year,” he said.
“The New York firefighters select a town that has undergone a disaster — tornado, flood, or fire — then they come out and do something for them for a weekend, and they bring a bunch of volunteers,” Bess said.
The out-of-state firefighters traveled and slept in RVs.
“We spent most of the weekend getting their vans unstuck from the mud,” Bess said, contrasting New York and its endless acres of paving to the rural Kansas reality. “The New York people don’t know how to drive in mud.”