JUNIAU, Alaska (AP) — More rain and wind were forecast Wednesday along the Alaskan coast, where two small villages…
JUNIAU, Alaska (AP) — More rain and wind were forecast Wednesday along the Alaskan coast, where two small villages were decimated by the remains of typhoon Halong and officials scrambled to find shelter for more than 1,500 people driven from their homes.
The weekend storm brought high winds and surf that battered low-lying Alaska Native communities along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the southwestern part of the state, nearly 500 miles from Anchorage. At least one person was killed and two were missing. The coast guard picked twenty people from their homes after the construction work driven out to sea.
Hundreds stayed in school shelters, including one without working toilets, officials said. The weather system followed a storm that hit parts of Western Alaska days earlier.
More than 1,500 people were displaced across the region. Dozens were flown to a shelter set up at the National Guard armory in the regional hub city of Bethel, a community of 6,000 people, and officials considered flying evacuees to long-term shelters or emergency housing in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
Among the worst-affected communities are Kipnuk, with a population of 715, and Kwigillingok, with a population of 380. They are off the state’s main road network and can only be reached by water or air this time of year.
“It’s catastrophic in Kipnuk. Let’s not paint a different picture,” Mark Roberts, incident commander with the state’s emergency management department, told a news conference on Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to continue to support that community, but it is as bad as you can imagine.”
Heartbreaking moment
Among those awaiting evacuation to Bethel on Tuesday was Brea Paul of Kipnuk, who said in a text message that she saw about 20 houses floating away in the moonlight on Saturday evening.
“Some houses were flashing their phone lights at us as if asking for help, but we couldn’t even do anything,” she wrote.
The next morning, she recorded video of a house flooded almost to the roofline as it floated past her house.
Paul and her neighbors had a long meeting at the local school gym on Monday evening. They sang songs as they tried to figure out what to do next, she said. Paul wasn’t sure where she would go.
“It is so heartbreaking to say goodbye to our community members who don’t know when we will see each other again,” she said.
About 30 miles (48 kilometers) away in Kwigillingok, a woman was found dead and authorities suspended the search Monday evening for two men whose house floated away.
The school was the only facility in town with full power, but it had no working toilet and 400 people stayed there Monday night. Workers tried to repair the bathrooms; a situation report from the state’s emergency operations center noted Tuesday that portable toilets, or “honey buckets,” were being used.
A preliminary assessment found that every home in the village was damaged by the storm, with about three dozen floating off their foundations, the emergency management agency said.
In Napakiak, power systems were flooded and severe erosion was reported in Toksook Bay. In Nightmute, officials said fuel barrels were floating in the community, and there was a smell of fuel in the air and a sheen on the water.
The National Guard was activated to assist with the emergency response, and crews tried to take advantage of any weather conditions to fly in food, water, generators and communications equipment.
There is a long road to recovery ahead, officials say
Officials warned of a long road to recovery and the need for continued support for the hardest-hit communities. Most rebuilding supplies would need to be shipped in and there is little time left with winter approaching.
“Alaska Native communities are resilient,” said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “But you know, when you have an entire community where basically every house is damaged and many of them are going to be uninhabitable now that winter is knocking on the door, there’s only so much an individual or a small community can do.”
Thoman said the storm was likely fueled by warm surface waters of the Pacific Ocean, which have warmed due to human-induced climate change and made the storms more intense.
The remnants of another storm, Typhoon Merbok, caused damage on the opposite shore a huge swath of western Alaska three years ago.
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Johnson and Attanasio reported from Seattle.
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