GREENSBURG — This town was blown to bits a year ago today. At the shattered hospital, where many of the 59 wounded showed up, the guy in charge was physician assistant Chris Gardiner, who lived in a home that he'd bought for $75,000.

In all, 13 people died. Dozens were wounded and everyone was homeless, including Gardiner, who patched up wounded people minutes after his house disintegrated.

Afterward, donors, insurance companies, and state and federal governments sent millions. The media made Greensburg's bravery a yearlong story. President Bush came.

Gardiner and his neighbors wanted to rebuild.

But at least half will not.

Half the town's 1,400 people have left, many because their $30,000 to $80,000 homes would cost $100,000 to $200,000 to rebuild. They left even though FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, provided $69 million in aid, even though insurance companies paid $153 million in claims.

Many people in Greensburg work for $10 to $12 an hour, good wages here. But they can't afford $150,000 homes.

Gardiner learned that his house would cost more than $200,000 to rebuild. "There were agonizing conversations with my family."

Today, as he prepares for his daughter Megan's high school graduation, where the president will return to hand her a diploma, half the town has departed, and Gardiner carries the ache of regret.

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"Let's be sure about one thing," said Chuck Banks, state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development Community Self Help Housing program. He's helped arrange millions of dollars in aid and loans in Greensburg.

"Greensburg will survive, in part because the town leadership is strong, vital and impassioned. Greensburg will come back. Maybe smaller, but there is real vision and leadership among those people."

But while the tornado did not kill Greensburg, the rebuilding costs might.

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"That would be a terrible loss," said Bob Dixson, the courtly, 6-foot, 7-inch retired postmaster who on Monday will become the town's third mayor in less than a year. "This is a wonderful place to raise children. There are good people here, who are working on ideas like the green initiative that could change the future, not only for Greensburg but for everyone."

In the months after the storm, volunteer corn sprouted all over town, along with heroism and ideas about "going green."

Gardiner was one of the brave. At the broken-apart Kiowa County Memorial Hospital his patient load that night rose quickly from 20 to 80. When rescuers brought in a woman broken in body and passing out from blood loss, Gardiner stripped four people of their belts and tied her to broken plywood to stabilize her. He begged people to clear the road to get ambulances to the hospital.

Bravery soon took other forms, as people like Steve Hewitt, who lost his home, thought creatively about how to rebuild. Hewitt, the city administrator, vowed that the destruction was an opportunity to start new ideas; He said the city would rebuild "green," with everything from dual-flush toilets to buildings lit by natural light, to attract environmental businesses.

These ideas germinated at the City Hall trailer while kernels of corn, blown out of bins and sown by the wind, sprouted cornstalks among the craters of basements.

People wanted to rebuild because this was Greensburg, where people knew each other from grade school, houses sold with handshakes, and "where neighbors put more Band-Aids on my kids than I did," as wheat farmer Dennis McKinney said.

McKinney, also a state legislator, remembers watching barefoot people who came out of basements and stepped onto streets strewn with twisted nails. They crawled into other basements to rescue others.

But many will carry those memories elsewhere now.

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Survivors went to work.

Mike Swigart, the barbecue catering guy, a member of the city planning commission, lobbied for growth, tamped down town rumors, rebuilt his house and painted it "ruby-lips red."

The Estes brothers, Mike and Kelly, owners of the local John Deere dealership, are rebuilding it, ensuring jobs, and running to meetings, urging business people to find ideas.

McKinney and Darin Headrick, who rescued a baby minutes after the houses blew apart, are rebuilding. McKinney built a new house on the basement of the old one. "If I'm going to ask people to come back, I need to set an example."

He helped bring $5 million in state cleanup money into town; Headrick, as superintendent, not only oversaw the resurrection of schools (in house trailers), but also oversees the mental health of 200 shaken schoolchildren.

"It's hard to understand what it is like for them," Headrick said. "We had 280 kids in the schools one day, and the next day 240 were homeless. When the wind blows now, or when they hear thunder, some kids get upset."

Headrick, when trailers would not allow room for lockers, bought a laptop for every student, loading bulky books into light laptops.

When he greets President Bush this afternoon, he'll do so with a student count that shrank by nearly a third.

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Greensburg is miles from anywhere.

That's great for raising a family.

"But everything has to be trucked in, tools, lumber, forms, rebar, roofing," McKinney said. "Getting it here requires fuel.

"And workers."

There was insurance, but many survivors did not have "replacement insurance" to cover rebuilding. And replacement insurance policies, though they paid more, came with policy limits that fell short of the full costs.

Some survivors, if they chose to rebuild their homes, would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to make up the difference.

As one more example of the crushing costs: The brick Kiowa County Courthouse survived, except for one thing, McKinney said. The tornado picked up a 1997 Pontiac , carried it three stories up, and dropped it nose first, punching a hole in the roof. The cost to remodel the inside: about $5 million; this, for a county with a population of only 5,000.

"We thought that would be simpler than it was," McKinney said "We had incredible help from FEMA. They spent millions and saved the town, and built FEMAville at the south end."

But then McKinney and other leaders made a suggestion. They asked FEMA about the possibility to find trailers for some of the extra concrete trailer pads, to house construction workers. Those workers could put their kids in schools, spend money in the Greensburg store.

FEMA said yes, but the deal hung up in negotiations with FEMAville's landowner. So it didn't happen.

"That meant the workers have to live in Hutchinson, Dodge, Pratt, or somewhere," McKinney said.

This led to big construction costs, said Tom Corns, president of the Greensburg State Bank.

"To get a contractor here you have to cover travel, motels, food," he said. "They are not going to do it for what it would cost in Wichita. You can't blame them."

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FEMA and Banks from the USDA pretty much saved the town, McKinney said. They put up most of the money to rebuild the water tower, dedicated and repainted this past week. FEMA spent millions to build FEMAville, ensuring that people have a foothold in town long enough to try to rebuild it.

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Can Greensburg survive?

And should it?

Is it worth the millions spent for 700 people and hope?

Those who stay say yes.

Kim Alderfer, a Greensburg native and assistant city administrator, has cataloged many of the city's successes and losses. On the night of the storm, frantic that her parents might have died, she searched in hip-deep water gushing out of the water tower. (Her parents survived).

Last week she stepped out of the trailer City Hall and saw stenciling going up on the new water tower, the name sitting above the town like a flag unfurled.

But city leadership is matter-of-fact about losses.

• They hope to attract "green" businesses, they said. But while they recently received 200 free dual-flush toilets from Caroma, a company marketing its product as a water saver, and while the green initiative got press attention, no green companies have moved in yet.

• The city before had 900 homes and businesses registered for electrical hookups; there are 343 now.

• The city got millions in aid, including from the Legislature, where McKinney has served for 16 years. "But now they're saying, 'Dennis, you still need money?' I have to explain that most of the millions they gave us had to be used to open a new landfill and clean up a town that had been blown to splinters. There wasn't much left to help people deal with the big sticker shock."

• Greensburg has received help with that need from the USDA's Banks, Mennonite Housing, the United Way and Habitat for Humanity. At least 10 houses might be built soon for single-parent families.

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Months after the town blew away, Gardiner learned that the cost of rebuilding his $75,000 home would be more than $200,000.

He was growing tired of living in the FEMA trailer. Outside the small trailers were reminders of what they'd endured, and might endure again: Storm shelters, crude steel boxes buried in earthen berms. To the west and north, Gardiner and his daughter could see the shattered tree limbs that survived, twisted and bare of bark, as though sandblasted by the gods.

There was no room to put things, he said. "My family wanted to know what we wanted for Christmas. And we looked around the trailer, and realized that there was no place to put anything we received as gifts."

Gardiner felt heartsick.

• • • 

McKinney drove his pickup slow around town the other day, giving a tour. The air was filled with the buzz of saws, the smell of cut pine, the rumble of trucks.

The walls and rooftops of buildings are rising out of the craters of what looks in places like a shell-blasted battlefield. There is little grass; much of the soil has been ground to powder by wheels. Wrecked houses with gaping windows line some streets, but on others, wall studs rise from new flooring. Dozers and backhoes break up the dirt. Trucks unload more wood, more roofing frames, more wet concrete.

People planted shrubs in dirt yards. Dixson, the man who will be mayor, has planted 280 grapevines outside his new home. On the north side stands a 6-foot angel: his wife had a chainsaw artist turn a wind-blasted stump into a supernatural being.

Up the street, St. Joseph Catholic Church is a trailer.

Peace Lutheran Church -- a trailer.

The Kiowa County District Attorney's Office -- a trailer.

The offices of the Kiowa County sheriff, the courts, the emergency management people, community development -- gray trailers all.

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The loss of things was bad. The loss of Greensburg's soul hurt too.

Handshake deals are gone, erased by a few con artists and thieves who came to town, erased also by dealing with government regulations. Earthly blessings come with baggage.

Sheriff's deputies patrol relentlessly to deter thefts from building sites.

Townspeople are a little unnerved by all the media attention of the past year. They've heard all the usual cliches about themselves: Greensburg survivors are "plucky" people with "grit," from "the Heartland."

The locals agree with this assessment, minus the cliches. They spent years surviving hot wind, lack of shade, and the ruthless economics that has de-populated Kansas towns for 40 years. But after a year of coverage they tired of it.

"It's not that we're ungrateful," said Kendal Lothman, who works for the county's Long Term Recovery office. "But other towns in the last year suffered more from tornadoes than we did, and they didn't get the attention. Nobody here asked for that."

Swigart tried to sum up the craziness, the promise and the sad hope of Greensburg.

He said his son Miles, now 11, came in to wake him when the thunder rumbled the other day, asking if they needed to run.

No, Swigart told him.

On the night of the tornado, 366 days ago, Swigart hid in his basement, his arms thrown around his wife and kids. He prayed the rosary as the wind screamed; he was halfway through a Hail Mary when the house blew to bits.

"At that moment, Miles cried out, 'We're all going to die!' " Swigart said.

"And I said, "No, we're not."

Today, when people say Greensburg might wither, he says the same thing.

"No, we're not."

• • • 

Gardiner, the physician assistant who had to decide whether to stay, hopes Swigart is right. He hopes Greensburg survives.

But soon after he shakes Bush's hand tonight, at his daughter's graduation, Gardiner will move to Hutchinson. He's found a job there.

And a yard with tall trees.

And a house he can afford.