What most amazes Dayle Heft today when he drives through his hometown of Greensburg, Kansas, has nothing to do with the blocks of empty lots where hundred-year-old homes once stood. It has nothing to do with the trees jutting into the sky, stripped of their branches. Nor is it the occasional pile of rubble that remains on the ground.
A year after a massive F5 tornado destroyed 95 percent of Greensburg, the wonder of those images has worn off. No, what strikes Dayle isn’t what’s gone. It’s what’s new. More than 200 homes are under construction. Better than a dozen businesses have been rebuilt. A town nearly wiped off the map is becoming a town once more.
“It’s tremendous what they’ve done here. Everything you see is new construction,” says Dayle, co-owner of Heft & Sons LLC, the town’s major contracting firm. He and his sons played a large part in the rebuilding. They dove into the clean-up efforts, clearing the remnants of some of Greensburg’s 900 destroyed homes. When FEMA built a trailer park for displaced residents, Heft & Sons excavated the site and poured 16,000-feet of sidewalks. And when local officials had finished burning off most of the debris from the tornado, the company was summoned to cap the remaining landfill.
It was tough, emotional work. “We were pretty well overwhelmed. We worked seven days a week, all year,” Dayle says. But much of that was made possible by a new Volvo EC240B excavator that Heft & Sons acquired immediately after the tornado struck. That machine has done all of the heavy lifting for the company as it tries to put the pieces of its town back together. “Man, it was a life-saver,” Dayle says.
“I thought we were going to go”
Heft & Sons is a homespun company that, like other such firms in rural America, has diversified in dramatic ways to grow. The firm started in 1972 when Dayle Heft bought a farm – now at 9,000 acres – “and just kept adding to it.” The firm’s backbone is its sand and gravel operation. But it also runs a readymix business, pours foundations and driveways and even has a chip-sealing operation on the state’s highways. “We’ve been in a position to be very successful. But we’re aggressive by nature,” says son Steve Heft, who oversees the company’s construction operation. Another son, Kevin, manages the farm. The company, ever resourceful, has succeeded using mostly older equipment, from loaders to excavators. Like many other things in Greensburg, that changed on May 4, 2007.
On that night, Dayle Heft hunkered down with his wife in their home northwest of town. They could hear the tornado sirens. Then their electricity went out. “I knew at that time it had probably hit Greensburg. We just got in the closet downstairs and took hold. I thought we were going to go.” But miraculously, they didn’t. Their home suffered only minor damage. Their neighbors weren’t as fortunate. Dayle ventured into Greensburg after the tornado. The devastation there was nearly complete. Huge cottonwood trees were ripped out of the ground. Homes and businesses were shattered. Cars were “just wadded up in balls,” Dayle says. But most striking were the splintered homes, their contents laid bare. “I’ll never forget the smell of lumber,” Dayle recalls. “It smelled like a sawmill, a wet sawmill.” Later, experts said the tornado reached nearly two miles wide.