CHAPTER THREETHE COLORS

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French author and pilot

 

At 9:25 p.m. on May 4, 2007, the tornado siren in Greensburg, Kansas, sounded.

The tornado that followed was 1.7 miles wide—wider than the entire town—with winds over two hundred miles per hour.1 The storm leveled more than 90 percent of the town. Nine of the 1,500 townspeople died, and most survivors lost nearly all their possessions.2 According to former mayor John Janssen, “We had fire hydrants pulled out of the ground along with their pipes. The water tower was gone. We had no power … ...

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