In May 2007 an EF5 tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas, ninety five percent of the town gone. The community decided to rebuild green, every public building targeting LEED Platinum, and I went in to help make that happen. I led the preconstruction and construction teams and coordinated the green redesign, but the part that made the rebuild possible was getting national manufacturers to donate the materials a green rebuild needed, because a town that size could never pay full freight for that kind of build.
I negotiated more than thirty million dollars, at wholesale value, in donated materials from national suppliers, working supplier by supplier until the program had what it needed. Probably over fifty manufacturers took part, and not only builders. You're rebuilding a city, so the need runs past building products: automotive, clothing, food trucks and food stands. The city was wiped out, so tons of vendors tried to attach themselves for free press, and we took every one that wanted in, with DuPont as the lead sponsor. Discovery Channel and Planet Green covered it.
What I take from Greensburg is that a disaster rebuild is a sales job before it's a construction job. They needed someone who could walk into a manufacturer's office and make the case for why their brand belonged on national television attached to thirteen homes and a set of commercial buildings rising out of rubble. I still believe the biggest lever on a project like that is the negotiation nobody sees, not the framing everyone photographs.