Four months after the remnants of a tropical typhoon wrecked communities in Western Alaska, hundreds of people who were displaced are considering abandoning their village altogether.
Tribal members from Kipnuk, a community of about 700 that was among the hardest hit, are now preparing for a possible complete relocation. Working in temporary quarters in downtown Anchorage, tribal workers spent weeks manning phones and computers to try to collect votes about relocation options from all the adults among Kipnuk’s enrolled tribal residents.
The tribal leaders have picked out two potential relocation sites, both at least 40 feet above sea level, and are open to other suggestions. By Feb. 20, they had collected all the votes and are tallying the results to determine what the consensus is.
The tribal vote is intended to be a final decision, said Rayna Paul, environmental director for the Native Village of Kipnuk, the tribal government.
“Oh my gosh, we’re not going back,” she said in an interview in her temporary office in Anchorage.
The storms that came with the remnants of Typhoon Halong comprised one of the state’s most devastating natural disasters in recent decades, and it spurred what was the biggest air evacuation in at least half a century, with about 1,600 people moved by military aircraft from the storm-stricken region.
Paul and tribal officials from Kwigillingok, another heavily damaged village, described the ravages during a panel discussion at the Alaska Forum on the Environment earlier this month.
Impacts included houses that were pushed off their foundations and sent afloat; graves washed away; vital stockpiles of fish, berries and other wild foods harvested over the past year were ruined. flooding and winds inundated the region with new risks: spilled heating oil, diesel, sewage and other noxious and hazardous substances.
The extent of the damage was shocking, Dustin Evon, Kwigillingok’s tribal resilience coordinator, said at the forum.
“I think we all did not expect the storm to be this catastrophic until houses started floating away and people started calling,” he said.
The storm’s total toll has yet to be calculated, as assessments could not be completed before winter set in, but Bryan Fisher, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, put the tab at $125 million as of the start of February.
The damage goes beyond dollars, and they added to damages already underway years before Halong became the latest in a series of powerful recent storms.
Paul said changes have been especially noticeable since ex-Typhoon Merbok hit the same region in 2022. The land and waters around Kipnuk have lost many of the qualities that supported generations of Yup’ik residents.
Blackberries and crowberries have disappeared, possibly because of saltwater inundating the sinking tundra, she said. Blackfish, a freshwater species, are “nowhere to be found,” she said. Tomcod have also been scarce.
Successive storms have pushed saltwater inland, contaminating drinking water and hastening the permafrost thaw that was already underway beneath the tundra’s surface because of climate change.
If residents decide to leave, the biggest challenge may be securing the money to move the village. There is no single agency in charge of village relocation, a problem cited by organizations like the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium as a hindrance to progress.
However, the concept of moving villages to escape hazards has plenty of historic precedent in Alaska.
In the most recent case, the village of Newtok, on the fast-eroding banks of the Ninglick River, moved to a more secure inland site called Mertarvik. Conducted amid funding uncertainties and bedeviled by logistical problems, the move took decades.
Kipnuk’s current site is not where the original settlement was located. An earlier site was used at least seasonally before the current site was recognized in 1922 by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, according to Alaska records. The older site had been rejected by the federal government as place for a permanent village because it lacked barge access, Paul said. The government built a school, part of a pattern that tied Indigenous Alaskans who previously moved around by season to permanent communities.
The old Kipnuk site is now one of the two candidate relocation sites that the tribal government has selected for consideration.
If Kipnuk residents decide to stay rather than go, a full return to the current village site will require a comprehensive rebuild that would take several years, officials say.
To Paul, there’s no point in putting that investment in the same place instead of a new and safer spot.
“They’re trying to rebuild when we’re going to be hit by another extreme weather event,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
For the hundreds of displaced residents like Paul, relocation is a necessity, even if it is just temporary.
She is getting used to apartment life in East Anchorage. She is also trying to adjust to the urban pace of life.
“It’s something different,” she said. “Seems like people don’t sleep.” But she said there have been some positive aspects of the move.
Her nephews are attending Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School and report that even though the school is much bigger than what they are used to — one of the biggest high schools in the state — the environment has been welcoming, Paul said. Some of the evacuated kids are even in a combined Kipnuk-Kwigillingok basketball team, she said.
And Paul is heartened by the sight of ducks flying around Anchorage. “When I see ducks, I’m like, ‘Woo-hoo! Soup,’” she said with a laugh.
She has no idea how long she will be in Anchorage — or even the location of her house, which was one of those in Kipnuk that floated away.
“I don’t have a house to go back to, you know. So very uncertain,” she said.
The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.
