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" On May 4, 2007, the town of Greensburg, Kan., disappeared. Scott Reinecke, a 45-year-old who ran an auto-repair shop in town, got home from work a few hours before it happened. According to the TV news, there were thunderstorms accompanied by small tornadoes 25 miles to the south. That was nothing unusual for rural Kansas in spring. Still, he had a funny feeling. Reinecke put on his work boots, collected flashlights, documents, food and water, and brought them all down to the basement. He cleared Christmas ornaments and the kids&amp;#039; old toys out from under the stairs, which were bolted to the house&amp;#039;s foundation. It was the safest place in his home. &amp;quot;I just had a feeling I should be doing all this,&amp;quot; Reinecke says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never had that before.&amp;quot; As he was finishing, the town&amp;#039;s tornado sirens sounded and the family hurried to take shelter under the stairs. When the tornado hit, at 9:45 pm, &amp;quot;The pressure change was so huge, it was as though you were instantly taken 100 ft. down under the sea,&amp;quot; Reinecke says. A few minutes later, when he and his neighbors emerged into the night, they saw not their homes, but rubble illuminated by flashes of lightning. The 205-mph winds of the mile-and-a-half-wide tornado--one of the most powerful ever recorded in the United States--had turned Greensburg, population 1574, into a debris field.   The Survival Worldview Americans living in the early 21st century are cradled in a mesh of technology. Oil refineries, complex computer networks and transportation systems function largely unseen to keep electricity flowing and store shelves stocked. But occasionally a hole gets blown in the modern world, and we are shocked -- even insulted -- to find that today&amp;#039;s wind and cold and rising waters can be as threatening as those of any era. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a double-edged sword,&amp;quot; says David Simpson, director of the Center for Hazards Research at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. &amp;quot;We have more available to us, but when systems fail, we have a bigger breakdown.&amp;quot; Hurricane Katrina was exceptional only in its enormous scale, not in its basic disruptive power. In the past year, thousands fled wildfires in California, and a single New York state blizzard left nearly a million residents without power. And the number of Americans at risk seems likely to increase as more people make their homes on earthquake fault lines and near tinderbox forests. By 2008, an estimated 160 million people will call the narrow fringe of U.S. coastline home, an increase of about 40 million since 1980. All of them will be at risk from oceanborne storms and tsunamis. We can&amp;#039;t always prevent bad things from happening, but we can take charge of how we respond. Recent disasters have left not just destruction, but also heroism in their wake, and we can learn from the experiences of the survivors. Insights also can be gleaned from previous generations of self-reliant Americans. Some of the lessons, such as what supplies to keep on hand, are very concrete. But the essential resource runs deeper than flashlights or bottled water. It is a worldview, a set of values shared by many of our forebears that can still be found beneath the surface of American life.  The Value of Realism &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve lived in Kansas all my life,&amp;quot; Reinecke says, &amp;quot;and we had always talked about the things we needed to do and where we should go in the event of a tornado.&amp;quot; In Greensburg, only 5 percent of the buildings remained standing, and none of those were left unscathed. Ten people were killed -- a grievous loss, but the number could have reached the hundreds. One reason for the relatively light toll was the 20-minute warning period, a benefit of modern technology. The other factor was local know-how. Like Reinecke, others in town knew that life on the Great Plains could be precarious, and they had emergency plans in place. &amp;quot;The unprepared realize they&amp;#039;re at risk about as fast as anybody else does, but it takes them longer to translate that into action,&amp;quot; says Michael Lindell, a professor at the Texas A&amp;amp;amp;M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t see guys in the NFL squatting down and drawing circles in the dirt. They learn the plays so that when the quarterback calls one out, they know their assignment. In the same way, people who&amp;#039;ve planned ahead for a disaster take much less time to get moving.&amp;quot; The greatest danger doesn&amp;#039;t always come in the first moments of a disaster; sometimes it develops over hours, days or weeks. On Oct. 12, 2006, a storm crackling with thunder and lightning boiled up over the warm waters of Lake Erie. A few weeks earlier, it would have been a summer gully washer. But on this early autumn day, the inland air temperatures had plummeted and a massive blizzard developed. Ground fall was greater Buffalo, N.Y., where people are accustomed to preparing for snowstorms with little more than extra beer and chicken wings. Now, however, the city&amp;#039;s grand old oaks and maples were still wreathed in leaves, and they quickly became laden with snow. Howard Winkler, the 70year-old retired owner of a floor covering company, says the breaking branches sounded like gunfire. &amp;quot;A limb would crack and pass through the others on the way down,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Vroomp! Vroomp! If you were in the way you were dead.&amp;quot; By the end of the 16-hour storm, 2 ft. of snow blanketed a tangle of powerlines and the broken limbs of an estimated 40,000 trees. Winkler&amp;#039;s road was impassable and the power was out -- no lights, no refrigeration, no telephone, no Internet connection. Most troublesome, furnace blowers were dead, and as night fell, the temperature would continue to drop. It may as well have been the turn of the 20th century -- except that no one on the block owned a root cellar or a milk cow.   The Value of Self-Reliance Dirt farmers living 100 years ago had less technology than we do, but the technology they had worked -- efficient wood stoves, hand pumps for their wells, draft horses. Plus, people were tough, accustomed to a daily routine that a 21st century time traveler would initially find exhausting and alien. I was such a time traveler. One morning in June 2001, my wife, Heather, 2-year-old son and I woke up in a house in Virginia&amp;#039;s Shenandoah Valley that we&amp;#039;d stripped of any convenience unavailable to local subsistence farmers in 1900. We had no electricity, running water or plastic anything, and we had sworn off cars and supermarkets -- all to undertake a year-long sabbatical from modern life, a return to the roots of our Southern rural ancestors. We grew vegetables, collected eggs from our hens and milked a pair of Nubian goats. (The goats weren&amp;#039;t as charming as they sound.) We fixed what broke, bought nothing, and spent the first half of the year filling a root cellar with long-lived food to get us through the second half. That kind of planning for the staples of life -- food, heat -- isn&amp;#039;t something Americans do much anymore. Today, you can expect to find fresh grapes and strawberries in the store year-round, delivered daily across continents and oceans. In a similar way, during disasters we&amp;#039;ve come to expect prompt outside help that a 1900 farmer never would have contemplated. Just two hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, rescue helicopters were in the air; within three days, 100,000 emergency workers had arrived. Yet, as thousands of Gulf Coast residents learned, you can&amp;#039;t always count on outsiders to bail you out -- especially in region-wide emergencies. &amp;quot;We in the emergency-preparedness community used to tell people to stock up and plan for 72 hours, and then help will come,&amp;quot; Simpson says. &amp;quot;After Hurricane Andrew, we said, `Wow, it might be a week.&amp;#039; Then Katrina hit. Now we&amp;#039;re talking two weeks or more.&amp;quot; Emergency responders have a name for the post-Katrina reality: Yo-yo. You&amp;#039;re On Your Own.   The Value of Community My wife and I weren&amp;#039;t truly independent on our farm in the shadow of the Alleghenies. The fruit pie Heather baked for Christmas was only possible because our neighbor gave us a bucket of cherries in June. (We canned them using a hot wood stove in the thick of summer.) One friend&amp;#039;s gift of homegrown vegetables got us over an unproductive hump in our own garden. Still other neighbors taught me how to handle our ornery draft horse and gave us barn cats when we needed mousers. If surmounting a 21st century disaster is anything like surviving ordinary life at the turn of the 20th century, it involves being a good neighbor -- someone like Howard Winkler. Once the snow stopped falling in Buffalo, Winkler started up his small electric generator. Then he surveyed the neighborhood. Downed limbs and crushed cars clotted the street. People were beginning to heat homes with kerosene and to illuminate them with candles. They were handling gasoline for generators. &amp;quot;If a fire broke out, you couldn&amp;#039;t get a firetruck down our street,&amp;quot; Winkler says. Besides, the power crews could work faster if the streets were cleared. Winkler grabbed his chain saw, stepped outside and did something straight from the days of barn raisings: He rallied the neighbors to get to work. Stories of communities pulling together in tough times can be found across the country. The tiny town of Imnaha, Ore., became isolated in January 1997 when unusually warm chinook winds melted snow in the surrounding mountains, spawning mudslides and floodwaters that washed away roads. Power was lost and wells were contaminated, but nearly two dozen locals found refuge in the shop owned by David and Sallie Tanzey, which was equipped with two generators and a 220-gal. gas tank. &amp;quot;Nobody panicked,&amp;quot; David recalls. &amp;quot;In a place like this, you&amp;#039;ve got people looking out for you, and you&amp;#039;re looking out for someone else.&amp;quot; Much the same story has been repeated during ice storms in the northern states, on the Outer Banks after hurricanes and in New York City after Sept. 11.   The Way Forward One September morning during our 1900 project, I was sitting on the porch, shucking sweet corn for canning, when two neighbors drove up to tell us that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center. In the days that followed, our farming routine took on a dark tinge, as if we were training for a post-apocalyptic world in which we were blasted back in time, compelled to poke seeds in the earth, cook with wood and haul water in buckets. Gradually, that dark sense dissipated. What didn&amp;#039;t go away during the following months was a heightened awareness of how modern technology has tied us together, increasing our vulnerability, yet also our resilience. &amp;quot;Disasters are knowable,&amp;quot; says Kathleen Tierney, a sociology professor and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Every year hurricanes batter the Gulf and East coasts, tornadoes churn through the Midwest, lake-effect snow buries the Great Lake states and wildfires burn across the arid West. We know that a big earthquake will probably strike California&amp;#039;s Bay Area within our lifetime. &amp;quot;We might not know when or exactly where,&amp;quot; Tierney says, &amp;quot;but we can understand the consequences and impacts ahead of time.&amp;quot; With modern forecasting and communications, many disasters can be anticipated and avoided as never before. Death rates from tornadoes -- even massive storms such as the Greensburg twister -- have fallen to a fraction of their levels in the 1950s. The more than 1800 people who died during or after Hurricane Katrina are a tragic loss. But few remember that 80 percent of the population of New Orleans -- 1.2 million out of 1.5 million -- safely evacuated well ahead of the storm. When a similar hurricane struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900, more than 8000 people lost their lives. Today&amp;#039;s America has additional strengths. The advent of big-box stores means it&amp;#039;s cheaper and easier to buy supplies in bulk in preparation for a storm. Cellphone towers are easier to repair than thousands of individual phone lines. Web sites maintained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other organizations empower individuals to plan effectively to take care of themselves, their families and their neighbors. Arguably, more of us are gaining practical skills through the resurgence of do-it-yourself carpentry and home remodeling, as well as through outdoor pursuits such as backpacking and climbing. Furthermore, the gravity of the threat has become clearer. In response to Sept. 11, Howard Winkler and his wife took an eight-week Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training course. Available in all 50 states, the program prepares ordinary citizens for their role as the nation&amp;#039;s true first responders. After Winkler cleared his Buffalo street of downed trees, he helped open a Red Cross shelter for hundreds of people who lacked electricity, heat or food, and then ran it for 10 days. CERT training didn&amp;#039;t cover shelter setup, but, Winkler says, &amp;quot;It gives you the sense that it&amp;#039;s okay to be a leader.&amp;quot; Finally, we have access to the wisdom of older generations. I used to be baffled and even amused when my wife&amp;#039;s grandmother insisted on preserving great quantities of food, storing jars under beds and in closets, before eventually giving most of it away. &amp;quot;There could be another Great Depression tomorrow,&amp;quot; she&amp;#039;d say. Besides, she&amp;#039;d lived most of her years on a family farm; she was following a lifetime of habit. Having lived through my own version of 1900, I understand better the unspoken values behind all that canning: realism, resourcefulness and a sense of community. Those are the qualities that Americans have traditionally had in abundance, ones that our forebears would have recognized as parts of the national character. As for Heather and me, we&amp;#039;re back in the 21st century now, dependent on the electrical grid, municipal water and supermarket supply chains. But we also feel embedded in our community. And we keep our old kitchen matches and oil lamps in the basement. Just in case. Additional reporting by Tom Colligan and Sarah Shatz "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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