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Kansas: Risks & Trends

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Same standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.

The 2007 Greensburg tornado

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Date May 4, 2007
Rating EF5, the first tornado ever rated under the newly implemented Enhanced Fujita Scale
Peak winds ~205 mph
Maximum width 1.7 mi
Duration on the ground 65 minutes
Deaths 11-12 (sources vary slightly)
Injuries 63
Town destroyed 95% of Greensburg (961 homes/businesses destroyed, 216 with major damage, 307 with minor damage)
Damage $250 million

A near-total loss, not a partial one

Most tornado case studies on this site describe severe but partial destruction across a city or county. Greensburg is the clearest example on the site of a near-total loss: 95% of an entire town of 1,400 people gone in about an hour. It’s the scenario this manual’s go-bag and shelter guidance is built for at its most literal.

The Ogallala Aquifer: the standing risk behind the next Dust Bowl

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Historical Dust Bowl frequency, western Kansas A Dust-Bowl-severity drought occurs roughly 3-4 times per century on its own, per paleoclimatic data
Projected Ogallala Aquifer depletion Some estimates project ~70% depletion within 50 years
Trend direction Water levels are mostly in decline from Kansas southward
Compounding factors cited by researchers Historic drought, aquifer depletion, climate change, and existing farm-program incentives, acting together

A slow risk, not an event

Unlike Greensburg’s tornado, the Ogallala Aquifer’s decline has no single date attached to it. It’s a standing condition, the same category as California’s water stress or Arizona’s Colorado River shortage covered elsewhere on this site, that raises the odds of a future acute drought event compounding on top of an already-reduced water supply, rather than a disaster with a start and end date of its own.

Sources