Searchers dig through rubble of Kansas town

Anxiety mounted here Sunday as rescue teams continued combing through the ruins of this country town in a longshot search for survivors, two days after a violent tornado took nine lives and leveled nearly everything.

As more than 40 searchers scanned the heaps of bricks and wooden beams for signs of life, National Guard troops and state law enforcement officers barred families from returning to their homes, frustrating many survivors eager to reclaim scrapbooks and other priceless mementos.

“We realize they’re trying to find people who are missing. But it would be nice to go in there and get some things before the rain ruins everything,” said Sarah Coates, 24, as she left a nearby emergency shelter with her grandmother.

“My aunt would really like to get her wedding ring.”

Officials said four soldiers from the nearby Ft. Riley Army base were arrested and accused of looting. The soldiers were being held at Pratt County Jail after they were allegedly caught stealing cigarettes and beer from a crumpled storefront Saturday evening.

“They had no authority to be there,” Sgt. Maj. Steve Rodina of the Kansas Army National Guard said of the soldiers, who may have pretended to be with the Guard.

State and federal officials said they had no idea how many of Greensburg’s estimated 1,400 residents remained missing, because families had scattered to the homes of friends and relatives through Kansas, making it difficult to know who was really unaccounted for. But they vowed to keep searching as long as there was still hope of finding a survivor in the town’s debris-covered basements.

“We never want to give up on someone,” said Kansas Highway Patrol spokesman R.L. Knoefel.

“It would have been nice if you could have seen this beautiful little town as it once was,” Knoefel added. “Now it’s all gone.”

Small as it was, Greensburg, about two hours west of Wichita, was considered the economic hub of its region. It was known for being home of the world’s largest hand-dug well, and for having a 1,000-pound meteorite on display in the center of town. The twister destroyed the well, and the meteorite is nowhere to be found.

At the east end of the two-lane highway that passes through town, a motel stands largely intact, and a small bar beckons with a large sign advertising Budweiser beer. But with every step west, the tornado’s toll grows grimmer, and the structures become harder to recognize.

A hardware store is missing its roof, but still has wrenches neatly hanging up for sale on a display wall. A block farther, wooden houses are flat like deflated balloons. Beyond that, for about a dozen blocks, little remains but mounds of rubble.

Some Greensburg residents sat around a breakfast table in the nearby town of Pratt on Sunday and searched for something familiar in an aerial photo of their town on the front page of the Wichita Eagle. They could not even agree on whether the picture was shot facing north.

The National Weather Service said Sunday that Friday night’s tornado had winds of more than 200 mph, was 1.4 miles wide as it went through town, and rated an F-5 -- the highest category on the tornado scale. The last F-5 twister in the U.S., in 1999 in Oklahoma, killed 36 people.

President Bush declared the region a federal disaster area Sunday, and he praised the Midwestern “pioneer spirit” and said he was confident Greensburg would be rebuilt.

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was initially unable to fly into Greensburg because of continuing hailstorms and tornado warnings. She arrived late Sunday afternoon and told survivors at a basketball gym turned shelter in nearby Haviland High School: “I am incredibly sorry for your losses. I know this is a community in mourning.” She promised residents that they would be allowed to return to their homes today.

Dick Hainje, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s regional administrator, said Greensburg’s near-total obliteration reminded him of what he saw in Mississippi’s coastal towns after Hurricane Katrina.

Many of the town’s leaders were already making plans to rebuild, and Hainje said he fully expected that most would succeed. As he and other officials addressed television cameras, three loose goats passed behind them and began eating grass amid the plywood and metal on the ground.

“We’ll have school in August,” said Supt. Darin Headrick of the 300-student Greensburg Unified School District, acknowledging that he had no idea where the classes would be held. “Greensburg’s going to come back.”

miguel.bustillo@latimes.com