Kansas Mutual Aid Update from Greensburg, KS July 2007

On Wednesday, July 11, members of Kansas Mutual Aid traveled back to the Greensburg, Kansas area to start work on developing gardens, playgrounds, and other projects for the evacuee community in their temporary homes. Several weeks earlier, Kansas Mutual Aid members had made contact with evacuees in the FEMA trailer park in Bucklin, Kansas, about 10 miles west of Greensburg. The trailer park housed dozens of the evacuees from the area, primarily from Greensburg. Greensburg, KS: July Update from Kansas Mutual Aid

On Wednesday, July 11, members of Kansas Mutual Aid traveled back to the Greensburg, Kansas area to start work on developing gardens, playgrounds, and other projects for the evacuee community in their temporary homes.

Several weeks earlier, Kansas Mutual Aid members had made contact with evacuees in the FEMA trailer park in Bucklin, Kansas, about 10 miles west of Greensburg. The trailer park housed dozens of the evacuees from the area, primarily from Greensburg.

When Kansas Mutual Aid members arrived in Bucklin, the trailer park was seemingly uninhabited, with only several vehicles visible and not a resident to be seen. We approached a trailer with a vehicle parked outside and knocked on the door, trying to figure out why the park seemed almost abandoned.

The resident we met indicated that all the residents of the trailer community were being moved to new trailers within Greensburg and that he was scheduled to move that weekend. 75% of the residents had moved already, and some of the trailers were already being fully removed from Bucklin. He indicated that the move had been unexpected, as he and other residents were told they would be in their current trailers for at least 6 months.

With our plans for Bucklin effectively scrapped, we headed toward Greensburg full of anxiety. We were going to try and re-enter the city, though we were banned from any area within city limits, after a late May incident when police officers forced out of the city and threatened to “disappear” us if we ever came back.

We approached Greensburg from a county road on the Southern side of the city, hoping to be a little less visible. This was also where we were told the trailers were supposed to be. As we approached the city limits, we noticed a large lot filled with trailers and mobile homes. A sign soon greeted us: “Residents Only. All others subject to arrest.”

The trailer site was located on the Southern edge of town, just a stone’s throw from Kansas House Minority Leader Dennis McKinney’s (Democrat) nearly rebuilt home (the only structure we saw in the area that had been rebuilt). We decided to drive by his home and continue to an administrative building for the trailer construction project, to get some details about the ongoing work.

We quickly realized that we had been in this exact area of the city before. Shortly before we had been escorted out of the city by police in late May, we had been in contact with a local farmer named Bob Hubert who had offered us his land as a site for a base camp for our relief work. After seeing how we were viewed by FEMA, Hubert decided not to have anything to do with us. His land is now littered with dozens of trailers and RVs being used as housing for hundreds of private contractors working on the trailer park.

We parked our car within the contractor housing area, and decided to talk to some of the workers to see what was going on. We instantly found a worker willing to fill us in on what was happening.

His name was Mike, and he was a young man from Louisiana. He had been called up with about 300 other Louisiana construction workers to help build the trailer park for Greensburg evacuees. He had been there for five weeks.

When he first arrived, there were 150 trailers completed. His crews were part of the effort to finish the last 200 trailers. They had a deadline of Sunday to finish. They had been working 14-16 hour days to get the work done, and still feared not being finished on time.

According to Mike, the contractors are making $2,000 a week (for 5 weeks of labor, with 300 laborers, that’s $3 million in labor expenses alone for this project!) and all other expenses, such as flying them and their equipment out there, were paid for by the FEMA.

He was directly employed by a firm called Red River Aquatech. They were subcontracting to Razz Construction. Razz was subcontracting to Kingston Environmental Services from Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Kingston was subcontracting to FEMA’s General Contractor, CH2M Hill, a Denver-based company that has received dozens of no-bid contracts through the Federal Government and FEMA. Some of CH2M Hill’s previous contracts include a $10 Billion contract to privatize utilities on over 30 U.S. Air Force bases across the world, a $28.5 Million contract to rebuild water infrastructure in Iraq, and a $100 Million contract in New Orleans to build trailers for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

We asked Mike why he was been flown up here to take jobs from Greensburg or the surrounding areas that had actually lost their jobs from the storm. “I quit asking that question when they put me on the plane and told me what I’d be making.”

We decided to drop in on the CH2M Hill and Kingston administrative trailers to see if they could tell us anything directly. On the way to the trailers, we were approached by a manager for Kingston. “Are y’all looking for work?” he asked. The three of us looked at each other, puzzled. Finally we answered: “What do you have in mind?”

He explained that he was looking for a couple of workers to help gather hay. It would be three to four hours of work for three to four people. We again looked at each other, and said that we would think about it and find him. How interesting would it be to actually be employed in a city we were banned from?

After getting no information besides a short list of the contractors working in Greensburg from the administration trailers, we found the Kingston manager and told him we’d be willing to work. We thought this opportunity might be a wise one to seize, to see what was really happening from the inside. He left us next to a truck and said that he would be right back.

After 15 minutes of waiting, we decided that rather than take jobs that should go to Greensburg residents, we would instead drive into the heart of the city, locate the Americorps tent and see what was going on with the relief efforts.

We cautiously drove through Greensburg. The daytime checkpoints had been removed, and although police were still heavily present, we were not stopped.

At the tent, we met Matt, the coordinator of the newly formed South Central Kansas Tornado Recovery Organization, a non-profit umbrella of local NGOs and religious organizations that would be taking over for Americorps. Americorps would be leaving the city by the weekend, and transferring all power to the new organization.

He explained that things were still a mess and that there was plenty of physical recovery work that hadn’t been done in the 2 months since the storm. Indeed, as we were driving through town we had noticed destroyed cars still blocking some streets, and the main thoroughfare through the city was much the same as it was during our first visit in early May.

The moratorium on private construction was lifted that same afternoon, Matt explained (how did Dennis McKinney rebuild his home if no construction was being allowed until that very day?) and that the city was bracing for a flood of applications and bids by private contractors.

One of the main issues that Matt was working on was trying to ensure that the local Dillon’s Grocery store would remain open. Dillon’s was not planning on re-opening its store in Greensburg, leaving the surrounding communities with no grocery store at all. The nearest store would be in Dodge City some 25 miles away.

We left our contact information with Matt and left the city. Somehow, we knew that this time we probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon.

Conclusion

It’s been two months since the storm destroyed Greensburg, Kansas. Kansas Mutual Aid has been conducting a variety of work in the area since a week after the storm. Since May 12, we have sent dozens of volunteers into the city and surrounding areas to work on clearing debris, telling the stories of the survivors, and offering ourselves as fellow working class people acting in solidarity with the people of the city.

Kansas Mutual Aid, during our meeting on July 15, decided that we would no longer be maintaining our physical recovery efforts in Greensburg. We will still attempt to maintain the relationships we developed during our work. We will also be forming a new working group to research and track the corporations profiting off the rebuilding effort.

In the vein of transparency and self-critique, we are offering the following reflections of our work.

SUCCESSES:

Up until the tornado in Greensburg, Kansas Mutual Aid had very little focus on physical recovery efforts in the wake of disasters. Our work focused mainly on issues directly affecting working class people in Lawrence: gentrification of our neighborhoods, access to food, military recruitment and war, prisons and incarceration, and police violence and targeting of our neighborhoods.

We were able to send several dozen volunteers to the area over the course of two months that helped perform needed work on working class people’s houses, small farms, and the infrastructure of Greensburg.

We worked with members of the socially conscious faith-based community, were able to secure housing at socially motivated churches, met and comforted residents of Greensburg, and brought back the stories that no one else was telling from the area.

Our work resulted in our expulsion from the city as “security risks”. Even after the expulsion, we continued to make trips into the surrounding areas and to perform the work we had made a commitment to performing. The expulsion brought needed media attention that gave us an opportunity to highlight the state’s mishandling of the disaster, and brought local attention to our other work.

Our delving into this new area brought us new relationships with individuals and organizations with whom we weren’t previously associated. This has benefited our work locally and helped us grow as an organization.

We feel that in a lot of ways, we were able to show that working class communities, through self organization, can work together to help each other in a more efficient way than FEMA or the state ever can.

SHORTCOMINGS

With every step we took, we encountered obstacles to our work. Because of FEMA, the chaos of the situation, our physical distance, and disagreements over goals, our work was not as efficient, effective, or as meaningful as we hoped it would be.

We were ignorant to ever feel that FEMA would just let us walk into the city of Greensburg to perform our work, or that they would tolerate us after we started to report on what we saw there. We consider the state and its agencies our enemies. It should be no surprise that they view us the same way.

Once we were initially kicked out of Greensburg, we struggled very hard to find a place to set up a base of operations, dreaming of almost creating a “Common Ground” of Kansas. This never materialized, as the residents of Greensburg had very little reason (even after we had shown our good intentions and hard work ethic) to trust us enough to give us land to set up on. We needed, and still need, to create stronger and enduring relationships with the people of Greensburg. Because of our distance and numerous commitments in Lawrence, we were never able to do this. It’s impossible to rely on phones and the internet to create these relationships, especially after the infrastructure of the region prevents constant access to phones or computers. We needed more face to face time.

Our position as working class folks within Lawrence made this face to face time impossible. We all had work or labor commitments within our own town, and unlike many within the Anarchist milieu, were not able to just up and leave for long periods of time, especially if we hoped to maintain our other already existing projects.

Basically, we were stretching ourselves too thin. We weren’t ready for a long term commitment to a city so far away.

Though we did get favorable media coverage, we did not get as much as we could have, given our unique perspective. We could have done more outreach to journalists, written letters to the editor, and tried harder to get our writing more widely published.

We also failed to adequately re-direct the media attention to the situation of Greensburg residents, and allowed many publications to focus on us and our expulsion rather than on the desperate situation of the evacuees. We also could have better re-directed the attention given to us onto our or to our other work locally.

Though we met many new people and organizations interested in supporting grassroots relief efforts, there are many that we did not contact, some of which may have had the time and resources to do more long-term work.

As the dust settled and we became sickened by the government’s response, we lost control and dove too deep into a project that we were not fully prepared for. As anarchists, we sometimes dream the impossible. This is not necessarily bad, but in this case, it threatened the rest of our work and led us to make false promises to people in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Closing Thoughts

All of us involved in the work in Greensburg will always be touched by what we experienced there. The inefficiency and utter failure of governments to deal with tragedies such as natural disasters is obvious to us. In Greensburg, we learned what self-organized communities can do to help each other in times of need.

We now more fully understand the difficulties of creating infrastructure for relief workers and volunteers, and hope to be better prepared to deal with such events in our own communities or even surrounding communities. None of us will ever regret the time and energy we committed in Greensburg, and instead are more empowered and determined than ever before to work for the fall of authoritarian structures that continue the suffering in disaster-stricken communities.

We do, indeed, dream the impossible, and this will never be a weakness. The ability, however, to sift through these dreams and focus our energies strategically will be our strength. However, we also know that sometimes strategies must be pushed aside to offer immediate assistance to those suffering around us.

Please send us your opinions about our work around the Greensburg issue, we value all input!

In love and solidarity,
Kansas Mutual Aid
Lawrence, Kansas
kansasmutualaid@hotmail.com