Residents of the two Western Alaska communities hardest hit by the remnants of Typhoon Halong have reached a consensus about their futures: They want to move their villages entirely.
In the Yup’ik village of Kipnuk, where almost all of the approximately 700 residents were airlifted after storm waters swallowed their community last October, tribal members have voted overwhelmingly to relocate.
An outreach campaign that contacted nearly all adult tribal members, now dispersed into temporary living quarters in Anchorage, Bethel or elsewhere, resulted in a 92% vote in favor of moving.
“We got a really big number,” said Rayna Paul, environmental manager for the Native Village of Kipnuk, the tribal government.
Paul summarized the results at a panel discussion March 24 at the annual Alaska Tribal Conference on Environmental Management.
Most of those voting also showed preference for a relocation site near a higher-elevation place farther inland. The preferred site was used by the ancestors of Kipnuk residents until about a century ago, when the federal government chose the current village site for its ship access.
Deciding on relocation creates “another burden,” especially since the federal and state governments have a contrary message, Paul said. “They are saying ‘No, you have to rebuild in place,’” she said.
For Kwigillingok, a Yup’ik village of about 400 residents, a consensus was reached in February in favor of moving, said Dustin Evon, tribal resilience coordinator, and Lucy Martin, the tribal government’s resilience assistant.
More details about the plans should be released in April or May, Evon said. “We’re looking at two sites right now,” he said. “We’re in the process of making maps.”
Relocating the villages will be expensive, with no federal or state funding yet available.
Several remote communities, far from road networks or other infrastructure, were slammed by ex-Typhoon Halong. More than 1,600 residents were evacuated from the remote region of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Impacts were most severe in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, both of which are low-lying communities located on the Bering Sea coast.
In Kipnuk, 90% of homes were destroyed, while in Kwigillingok, about a third of the houses were knocked off their foundations and set afloat, said James Benzschawel, an Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium emergency preparedness manager who gave a presentation at the conference.
Representatives of those two communities described harrowing experiences and storm damage conditions that appear to make the sites uninhabitable, at least for now.
In Kipnuk, Paul said, one man jumped from his floating and rocking house and tried to swim to safety, Paul said. He managed to climb aboard a piece of floating boardwalk, struggled for hours and watched dislodged coffins flow by on the river before he was rescued.
Similar scenes played out in Kwigillingok, Martin said.
“When I looked out the window right before the power went out, it was like a real-life horror movie. You could see graves rolling. You could see buildings floating away, boardwalks floating before it hit our house,” she said.
Her own house was set adrift sometime after 2 a.m., shortly after the same thing happened to her parents’ house, she said. Houses sent afloat sometimes hit each other; that happened a few times to her house before it finally came to rest upstream several hours later, she said.
Now, at the insistence of her parents, who wanted to be as close as possible to their traditional fishing and hunting areas, the family is living in Bethel, Martin said. Though the hub community of roughly 6,500 people is much bigger than Kwigillingok, it has a housing shortage that affected evacuated families like hers.
Paul is now living in Anchorage, along with hundreds of other displaced Kipnuk residents. She said one challenge is addressing stress and mental health problems, exacerbated by easier access to alcohol and drugs. She suggested that some kind of central gathering place be set up to help evacuees strengthen their sense of community and culture.
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