Holiday in Greensburg

Dave Strano stood at the edge of a crowd on Massachusetts with a bright-red clown nose on his face, admiring his reflection in a restaurant window. Around him, a dozen young Lawrence residents loaded shovels and work gloves and yellow boxes of Tastee-Os cereal into a green-and-purple school bus with the anarchist flag pasted above the windshield. Aware that his fellow travelers were bound for a place they weren't welcome, Strano joked that the ripped foam nose he'd found in a dumpster behind Jayhawk Towers might be enough to fool an army of police officers.

"That'll get me into Greensburg," he announced sarcastically.

The joke earned cautious laughter from the other members of Kansas Mutual Aid, an anarchist collective that organizes anti-war protests, tends community gardens and advocates on behalf of prisoners. The group was about to pull away from the Solidarity Revolutionary Center and Radical Bookstore to spend Memorial Day weekend in central Kansas, removing debris from the EF-5 tornado that chewed through Greensburg and spit out its contents across miles of surrounding fields. The week before Memorial Day, Strano and four others were escorted out of the ravaged city limits and told they'd be arrested if they returned.

Joe Carr, a member, says the group mobilized after the May 4 storm. Unlike countless church groups and individ- ual do-gooders, Kansas Mutual Aid approached the disaster from a political perspective. Its members were concerned about residents' human rights and civil liberties in a newly militarized city. They worried about the location of the prisoners in the county jail. And they predicted an inept state-run cleanup.

On May 12, four KMA members drove to Greensburg to survey the situation. Carr says the relief activities were incoherent, but the heavy police and National Guard presence reminded him of his trip to Fallujah, Iraq. As the four Lawrence residents walked the streets looking for work — one of the women with a shaved head and the men wearing long hair — a squad car from the Johnson County Sheriff's Department followed them.

Soon, they pitched in to help an elderly couple clear soaked furniture from their flooded and mildewed basement. "On our way out, they said, 'Thank you so much. Come back and bring 50 more,'" Carr says.

The next week, they returned to a less friendly reception. They rolled through the police checkpoint and headed to a makeshift government nerve center — a small area surrounding Greensburg's brick courthouse that was packed with police cars from around the state, Federal Emergency Management Agency campers and white trailers that housed the temporary City Hall and municipal services. That's where relief workers were supposed to coordinate with the disaster officials — and it's where the four were confronted by Ty Moeder, an officer with the Olathe Police Department.

KMA members claim that Moeder told them to take their hands out of their pockets and move to a side street to avoid making a scene. Moeder said they were a security threat because of their affiliation with anarchism. With a dozen law-enforcement officials backing him up, he told them that they were not welcome in the city and would be arrested if they came back. After Moeder took pictures of their vehicle, the group was escorted out of Greensburg by five squad cars with lights flashing.

Sgt. Mike Butaud, spokesman for the Olathe Police Department, didn't deny the interaction but declined to comment on the incident. He referred questions to the Kansas Attorney General's Office, saying the OPD was "taking a backseat to the state."

Ashley Anstaett, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Paul Morrison, said law-enforcement officials are empowered to "request people leave the area if they believe they are a security threat or disturbing the rebuilding process." She couldn't cite the specific reason for the activists' expulsion, though. "I'm assuming they were doing something that law enforcement believed was causing problems," she told the Pitch.

Fewer than 48 hours after being kicked out of Greensburg, the group reconvened in a muggy backroom of Lawrence's Solidarity Center, recruiting as many volunteers as could fit in the KMA's painted school bus for a trip the next weekend. Though they wouldn't be able to drive into the city and be directed to a homeowner in need, they planned to find work outside the city limits.

As rain fell near Greensburg on Saturday morning, the group met Bill Roenbaugh on a dirt road on his sprawling property near Belpre. The neatly dressed farmer stopped his white Toyota SUV at the edge of a field lined with the remnants of power lines. He pointed to his left and said a house up that way had collapsed, killing one man and putting the man's wife in the hospital. In the other direction, his neighbor's home was battered as well. He said scores of volunteers had driven out to offer help and he asked the KMA members if they were part of a specific group.

One answered quickly, telling Roenbaugh that the group was from "the Kansas City area" and that the Kansas Mutual Aid title sums up the group's work: helping fellow citizens in need. Nobody mentioned the group's affinity for anarchy.