Officials in Alaska rushed Tuesday to find housing for people from tiny coastal villages devastated by the remnants of Typhoon Halong. But the remote location and severe damage are limiting their options as they race against other impending storms and the onset of winter.
High winds and storm surge battered low-lying, isolated Alaska Native communities along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwest Alaska, nearly 500 miles (800 km) from Anchorage, over the weekend. The Coast Guard plucked two dozen people from their homes after the structures floated out to sea in high water, three people were missing or dead, and hundreds of people were staying in school shelters — including one with no working toilets, officials said.
The system followed a storm that struck parts of western Alaska days earlier.
Across the region, more than 1,300 people were displaced. Dozens had been flown to a shelter set up in the National Guard armory in the regional hub city of Bethel, a community of 6,000 people, and officials are considering flying evacuees to longer-term shelter or emergency housing in Fairbanks and Anchorage as they run out of room there.
Fuel storage depots intended to support communities in the region had apparently been damaged, threatening pollution that could harm the fish and game the Alaska Native residents rely on for subsistence. Some people in the area may have lost freezers full of food such as salmon and moose intended to get them through the winter.
The hardest-hit communities included Kipnuk, population 715, and Kwigillingok, population 380. They are off the state’s main road system and reachable this time of year only by water or by air.
“It’s catastrophic in Kipnuk. Let’s not paint any other picture,” Mark Roberts, incident commander with the state emergency management division, told a news conference Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to continue to support that community, but it is as bad as you can think.”
In Kwigillingok the school was the only facility with full power, and workers were trying to fix the bathrooms. A preliminary assessment showed every home in the village was damaged by the storm, with about three dozen having drifted from their foundations, the emergency management office said.
Power systems flooded in Napakiak, and severe erosion was reported in Toksook Bay. Officials activated members of the National Guard to help with the emergency response, and crews were trying to take advantage of any breaks in the weather to fly in food, water and generators.
Officials warned of a long road to recovery and a need for continued support for the hardest-hit communities with winter just around the corner.
Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, noted that even if supplies could be brought in immediately, it is too late in the year to rebuild.
“Indigenous communities in Alaska are resilient,” Thoman said. “But, you know, when you have an entire community where effectively every house is damaged and many of them will be uninhabitable with winter knocking at the door now, there’s only there’s only so much that any individual or any small community can do.”
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Johnson reported from Seattle. Associated Press writer Cedar Attanasio in Seattle contributed.
