Mom had gone to bed about half an hour before. Her meds make her tired; besides, the threat of dangerous weather seemed to have passed. I was reading — what I was reading I can't remember now, was it a computer magazine? I was about to re-read all of Tolkien, maybe I was browsing through The Hobbit. I can't remember. The television was on as background noise. A weatherman's concerned voice caught my attention. There was a big tornado headed right for us. For the first fifteen minutes it looked like it would thread the needle to the east, between Greensburg and Haviland.

Just to be on the safe side, I grabbed the cat carriers from the utility room, put the both cats inside, set them in the hallway, then took mom's shower chair from the bath and put it against the sturdiest part of the hallway, where the drawers and cabinets were, at the east end. I awoke mom and put her on the chair. I closed all the doors in the hallway after getting my cell phone and a flashlight. The weather radio and the TV were blaring in the living room. I could hear the town's siren blowing.

The shrieking began. It died off for a moment. The cable TV went out, static noise came from the television, but I could hear the weather radio: "The residents of Greensburg should take shelter immediately. A large, dangerous tornado is approaching the town from the south." The shrieking returned, much louder, much more intense. The lights went out. I was kneeling in front of mom. I told her I loved her.

Others have said they heard the wood in their houses ripping and tearing. I don't know about that. It might have happened, or it might be an unintentional after-the-fact confabulation. As far as I'm concerned, a bomb went off. Bang! The shrieking consumed everything. The sturdiest part of the house behind mom just disappeared. The rest of the house fell on me. I went down into the rubble, falling on the cat carriers. I grabbed mom's legs as I was forced down. She was out in the storm. It tried to take her from me. The winds pulled her up off the floor. I clutched desperately at her legs. One of the cat carriers was almost sucked out. I shifted my weight to keep it under me. How long this horrid shrieking went on, I do not know, the winds pulling and ripping at us. "I knew I was going to die someday," I thought to myself. "I just didn't think it would be this way." My ears popped so violently, I thought I'd go deaf. I was completely pinned from about the bottom of my chest on down. I couldn't move my legs. The shrieking stopped. The winds subsided. Mom was alive. She spoke to me, she answered my questions. The storm had sucked off her eyeglasses and her shoes. I squirmed around and, using the flashlight, peered into the cat carriers under me. The little gleaming frightened eyes of Speed and Bright Eyes looked back at me. We made it. The cell phone was still in my pocket. At that point I hadn't realized what happened. I assumed it had been an ordinary tornado and we had the bad luck to have been in the part of town it hit. I knew my neighbors, I had lived as an adult in Greensburg for the last four years while caring for mom, I knew they'd come for us. I dialed 9-1-1. Nothing. There was no signal. I took out the little flashlight and began to wave it around. Mom was moaning in pain because I was on top of her legs. I couldn't get off of her. By straining every muscle, I could lift myself up enough to ease the pressure on her legs.

Someone, a young man in a ball cap, yelled from the street. He followed my voice and the light from the little flashlight up into the wreckage. Something caught his eye as he lifted a chunk of drywall. "There's another one"! he screamed. He dropped the drywall on my head and ran off. God, I hope he made it to safety. He was a brave man to come out into the wreckage to help us. I don't spite him for dropping the drywall on my head. It didn't hurt.

The wind began to howl again. I knew what to do this time. I knew I wouldn't be sucked out, I was in too deep. The cat carriers were under me. I had mom's legs in a death grip. So why was I so frightened this time? I was terrified. I wasn't really that frightened the first time; a feeling of immense sadness was with me during the F5, and a desperate desire to keep mom and the cats alive. This second one, I was scared.

The winds were not as intense. I could feel them pulling on mom, but they didn't levitate her like the F5 winds had. My ears popped, not as badly as the first time. The sound they made was deeper, like the buzzy blown subwoofers in some jerk's loud car stereo — nothing like a train. Where does that come from, "sounds like a train"? The smaller tornado mumbled and howled as it plucked at us. It seemed to be declining in intensity. I thought it was over. There was a sensation in my left ear. I panicked and clutched at mom's legs and the cat carriers. Then I laughed. Rain was falling in my ear. It was over. My mom and I and her cats had survived.

What came next wasn't frightening. It was spooky. Maybe eerie would be a better word. There was still no cell signal. I tried several times. I waved the little flashlight around and yelled. Nothing. Greensburg people are reliable in this: if they could be here helping, they'd be here. Something really, really bad must have happened, something much worse than an ordinary tornado. By intense shifting and turning, I was able to get off of mom's legs. She was talking to me, she was all right. We lay there for the longest time, just waiting. I couldn't do anything else but wait. I was trapped. The knowledge came to me slowly: if we were going to get out of this, I'd have to do it.

What followed was the most intense physical struggle of my life. Never mind the martial arts tournaments, the wrestling matches, or anything else in my athletic career. What was worse, I was fat from sitting around with mom and I was fifteen, twenty years older. Every muscle in my body was strained, pulled, and taxed to the maximum. I thrashed and turned. I pushed and pulled at the wreckage burying me. Finally, finally, I was free except for my left ankle. It was pinned between shattered structural lumber. How I got it free, I don't know. I squirmed out of the bottom of the heap. Mom's shower chair was nearby. How is that possible? I don't know what happened to the roof or the roof of dad's machine shop behind the house. The antique wooden desk in my room had disappeared. It weighed around three hundred pounds. Gone. Her little plastic shower chair, right there. I sat her down on it and wrapped her up with every rag or piece of clothing I could find. The cat carriers went next to her. Speed and Bright Eyes were fine. They weren't making a sound, which is unusual for them. The cats didn't really like me before the tornado. They weren't that affectionate. After? It's all love now.

My little flashlight was giving out. Just before it died, I saw something in the wreckage. Years ago, my buddy Craig bought me a flashlight at a hardware sale. It's my favorite one, covered in rubber, a rubber seal at the front. I had upgraded the bulb to an LED just a couple weeks before. It's the size of a lightsaber. Using it, I found a pair of shoes in the wreckage. The ones I had been wearing were at the bottom of the rubble pile. Mom's had been sucked off by the tornado. Her glasses were taken. Perhaps the rubble had deflected the winds, since I was still wearing my glasses. We waited.

There was wreckage everywhere. The next day's photos and video coverage didn't begin to illustrate what I saw. Bulldozers and other heavy machinery had cleared most of the streets by the time the rest of the world could see. The tornado left wreckage and debris everywhere. This should be stressed: everywhere. We were in a sea of wreckage. The streets were blocked or buried in it. Trees, buildings, furniture, everything was everywhere. Nothing standing, no one anywhere. Just us and the wreckage. Was it like that for hours? I lost track of the time. I had taken off my watch, it was on my desk, the other one, not the antique one. The wall collapsed on top of the desk, protecting the contents. I found my watch three days later while going through the debris.

Time passed. We were alone.

The first sign of existence beside ourselves came in the form of a giant yellow-white hound. This fellow lived down the street. Somehow he had found his way through the destruction to us. The big hound leaped and danced around us. If he had been human, he would have laughed at finding someone else alive. We waited.

The first human to show up was a big guy from the power plant. How he made it into the south part of town I don't know, since the power plant is on the north edge of Greensburg. He saw my flashlight from the street and joined us in what remained of the house. He told me his story. The power plant workers had been notified of possible outages on the state grid. They went down to start up the generators, to keep Greensburg's lights on. The first one, the big one, hit the power plant just as they were starting up the generators. The power plant fell on him. He dug himself out and began to wander around town, trying to find people to help.

Our little group stood in the darkness. If not for the flashlights, it would have been absolute blackness. There was mom, our cats, the big yellow hound, our new guest, and myself. Nothing else. Not a sound.

We lived about six blocks from the county sheds, which were on the southern edge of town. I heard machinery start up from that direction. One of the county's big bulldozers came rumbling up from the south, plowing the trees and roofs and houses out of the street. I knew we were saved. Who was this smart person? The one who figured out that the tornado's winds might have wrecked the county's buildings but not damaged the heavy metal inside them? I'd like to know.

People appeared like they were popping out of the ground. A mob of young men, led by a woman wearing a police reflective vest, charged into the wreckage. They discovered the elderly Mrs. Mucklow alive in the wreckage next door. While the woman was examining mom, I hopped out the front of our house to join the crew trying to dig Mrs. Mucklow out. There was room for only three or four people in the ruin of her house. I backed out and rejoined my mom. This impromptu rescue mob grabbed mom and her shower chair and carried her away. They grabbed the cat carriers. The power plant guy joined the mob, as did the dog. They had to put mom down for a moment when I fell into the house's crawl space. Many hands grabbed me and pried me out. Our old house liked me so much, it didn't want to let me go. Then we were swept away to the cleared street, where a guy in a pickup truck loaded us up. It wasn't his truck. He told us so. The tires were going flat from multiple punctures, a result of driving over tornado wreckage. Did he commandeer this vehicle after seeing the need to ferry people out? Maybe so. Everyone was gathering at the Dillons parking lot on the highway. That's where he took us. An ambulance took us to Pratt. Almost seven hours had passed since the tornado. The recovery had begun.

In Gratitude

My thanks to Steve Warner and Craig Scribner for photographs of the damage and their help in the aftermath.

My thanks to Becky Warner, Larry Rayl, his wife Dee, and an anonymous host of Americorps and Mennonite Disaster Services volunteers for their help.

To the kind people of the Red Cross, the helpful workers of the city of Greensburg, State Farm representatives, Roman Henderson, Mike Petersen, the Calvary Chapel in Hutchinson, the Friends Church in Haviland, and everyone else who donated their time and money, thank you.

The State of Kansas sent us grant money to help replace the cars we lost. They also hauled off the rubble of our destroyed home at no charge.

FEMA may have helped others, but they didn't help us. I can't thank them because they didn't do anything for us. Contractors hired by FEMA did interview me about the damage. Nothing happened as a result of the interview. The SBA people can at least be credited for showing up. Two of them, dressed as if for an office conference, showed up one day to stare at us as we worked in the rubble. We received a small pile of letters telling us what FEMA wasn't going to do for us. A FEMA representative did call us a couple months afterwards, to see if we were all right. I'll take a Mennonite with a shovel over the federal government any day of the week. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

Satellite images of Greensburg were posted online to aid in the recovery effort. My thanks to Google for this service. They can be viewed at: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/05/greensburg-kansas-tornado-imagery.html

Look south on Main Street until you reach the cross street at the grade school. That's Garfield Street. Go west about one and a half blocks. Our house was on the south side.

Copyright © 2007 R. P. Bird
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This is a highly personal account of the May 4, 2007 tornadic storm that destroyed Greensburg, Kansas. I have tried to be as accurate as I could. My assumptions about the meaning of what I heard and saw may or may not be accurate.

I reject this for several reasons. The bombardment of the moon would have begun almost immediately, before the fleet could deploy to protect Rebel personnel on the surface. Such a devastating explosion wold have produced fragments traveling at several miles a second. If they were going to hit the moon, they'd have started in the hours between the second Death Star's destruction and the cremation of Anakin Skywalker's remains and the start of the celebrations.

No one would stay on a doomed planet for a celebration. The emotions of Luke and the others are all wrong if an apocalypse is going on just a few hundred miles away. Would the Force ghosts of Yoda, Obi-wan, and Anakin be smiling if widespread devastation were taking place? They'd be unhappy, since such an occurrence would cause massive disruptions in the Force.

So what happened to the mass of the wreckage? From the expanded universe we know that a few bits and pieces did hit the planet, causing local cratering. Other small parts went into orbit, whether around the moon or its gas giant parent planet the literature doesn't say (Or maybe it does. I'm basing my analysis on what I saw in the movies and what I've read of this topic from proponents and detractors.). That's it. And maybe, maybe a small wormhole was opened at the site of the explosion. Also, maybe, there was a short-lived debris ring around the moon.

We know there was no bombardment of the planet or imminent ecological disaster from the behavior of Luke, his friends, Rebel pilots, and the Force ghosts celebrating on the surface. The effects would have been almost immediate. What constrained the blast and its wreckage? If an object of similar mass were to explode above the Earth, all hell would break loose within minutes, and hour at the outside.

No one involved in this debate has yet mentioned, except briefly, the advanced technologies of the Star Wars reality and how they might have impacted (heh) this subject. There has been a brief discussion of hypermatter and the possibility that when the DS2's hypermatter reactor blew, it punched a hole through realspace and hyperspace to form a black hole. That's where all the matter went. The original proponent of the Endor Holocaust rejects this based on one statement by Han Solo. It's in the first movie (this may be a paraphrase, since I'm too lazy to look it up): "Flying through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, kid. You fly too close to a supernova or through the center of a star and that'll end your trip right quick." He assumes that this means hyperspace matter or vehicles in hyperspace will react with realspace matter. So, according to this interpretation, even if the wreckage gets sucked into hyperspace, it'll still hit the planet.

That ain't gonna play. Matter is everywhere in the galaxy. Even in supposedly empty interstellar space, there is a "gas" of one molecule per cubic centimeter (or is it cubic meter?). If material in hyperspace reacts with realspace matter, anyone attempting to travel in hyperspace would be killed within seconds of firing up the old hyperdrive. Imagine the kinetic energy of something traveling at multiple times the speed of light hitting even a single molecule of matter in normal space. Ka-boom! That doesn't happen in the Star Wars reality. So why steer clear of supernovae and stellar interiors? The gravity there (supernovae produce black holes and neutron stars) would warp spacetime so much, it might impinge on hyperspace. Since realspace and hyperspace are accessible to each other pretty much everywhere, there is a connection between the two, a kind of proximity, that is affected by extreme distortions in the spacetime of realspace. Luke survived multiple hyperspace jumps without exploding. So, other than gravity wells, matter cast into hyperspace cannot interact with realspace matter.

This doesn't even begin to deal with the technologies in play aboard the DS2 (or any other large starship). Besides the hyperdrive, which may work by keeping a small bubble of hyperspace permanently in existence (Han's problems in Empire may have had to do with getting the bubble to expand enough to encompass the ship, just speculation), there are hypermatter reactors, which may also keep a permanent connection to hyperspace active. Perhaps hypermatter is in a containment field, to keep it from interacting with realspace matter or folding back into hyperspace. Then there is antigravity technology. I've read that it does not rely on hypermatter or hyperspace tech. It is a result of quantum manipulations of realspace matter. Maybe string manipulations. This technology would have been employed on a massive scale in the Death Star and the second Death Star. What would be the result of the incineration of these exotic materials?

They were firing the giant turbolaser in the last moments of DS2. That's an immense amount of energy to be shifting around, being converted from hypermatter to photons.

What does this stew produce when exploded? Not any conventional explosion, that's what. This would have been known to the Rebellion, to anyone involved in starflight at any time in the last 50,000 years or so of the Star Wars reality.

Anti-gravity technology may account for the slight damage done to Endor's moon by the impact of small fragments of the DS2 and at least one Star Destroyer (on an interesting side note, AG tech might have been absolutely necessary for starships, to lower their momentum, to allow them to reach realspace speeds approaching the speed of light, or to land on planets, even to keep their structural integrity during what would otherwise be ultra-high-G maneuvers). What exotic particles would be emitted when such exotic matter is incinerated? The interaction with the ordinary materials on the ship might be consumptive. The strange particle interactions might produce particles that would simply disappear, either into hyperspace or, because of their strange quantum attributes, to literally vanish.

Let's add in hypermatter. Large amounts of hypermatter might literally fold themselves and any nearby objects back into hyperspace. An energetic explosion combined with this would probably open a wormhole, or at least an unstable hyperspace portal, sucking the majority of matter caught in the explosion into hyperspace. What small bits of the shell of the DS2 that didn't get whisked away in exotic particle interactions or the hyperspace portal (or wormhole) would have been decelerated enough to go into orbit around Endor's moon, forming a temporary ring that would slowly degrade over a year or two. A few larger bits would have posed no problem because of the AG materials they contained.

The Star Wars fictional reality is a science fiction reality, with extremely advanced technologies and materials that would radically affect normal matter and energy interactions, even in an explosion. I should re-phrase - especially in an explosion. The Ewoks and their home on the sentry moon were saved because of the exotic materials and spacetime manipulation technologies employed as an everyday thing in this reality. Scenarios leaving them out may tell us what would happen in our harsh realm (like the nasty things that might happen to us in a cometary impact of Earth), but tell us nothing of what might happen in a science fiction reality.

This was such fun. I thank Curtis Saxton ("Kill all Ewoks.") and Gary M. Sarli ("Save the little critters.") and Wookieepedia for all the pure pleasure this has given me. If only I could as easily convince you all to vote Democratic in the upcoming election.

10/3/2006
R. P. Bird