One person has died and more than 50 people have been rescued after an unprecedented storm system triggered devastating flooding in Western Alaska communities, displacing more than a thousand people over the weekend.
The remnants of Typhoon Halong battered the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region, causing storm-surge flooding in some communities, destroying homes and infrastructure in villages across the region, and sending residents fleeing to safe shelter. By Sunday, the National Weather Service reported hurricane-force winds gusting over 100 mph and record tidal surges.
On Monday, the storm’s catastrophic toll began to come into focus across the region as residents of villages reported their losses: More than 1,000 people displaced from their homes, dozens of houses floated off their foundations and destroyed, crucial infrastructure such as sewer systems and wells damaged, and precious caches of subsistence food lost.
On Monday evening, Alaska State Troopers said they had found a deceased woman in the village of Kwigillingok, where another two people remain unaccounted for. The woman will be identified after her next of kin is notified, troopers said.
Authorities still taking stock of a historic disaster said Kwigillingok and Kipnuk were among the hardest-hit villages.
“If you think about previous instances of major inundations, such as Hurricane Katrina, that will start to paint the picture for what you might imagine has happened along Western Alaska,” U.S. Coast Guard Sector Western Alaska Capt. Christopher Culpepper said at a briefing Monday afternoon.
“It is absolute devastation,” said Culpepper, who is also the Coast Guard’s U.S. Arctic Commanding Officer, describing Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. “If you imagine the worst-case scenario, that’s what we’re dealing with.”
As of Monday morning, 51 people from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok had been pulled from flooded homes, according to the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center. U.S. Coast Guard crews rescued 34 people, the Alaska Army National Guard nine more, and the Alaska Air National Guard extracted eight people and two dogs.
Scores of people have been evacuated, including several from Kipnuk who were taken to Bethel for medical care, the Rescue Coordination Center said. Plans were underway to evacuate 40 more people with medical needs, including elders and pregnant women, to Bethel, according to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. About 400 people were sheltering at the school in Kwigillingok and 680 in Kipnuk, the Bethel-based tribal health organization said in a statement. More than 1,000 people around the region have been displaced from their homes, the statement said.
Rescue efforts continued Monday, including a search headed by the troopers for the two people missing from Kwigillingok, a community of about 400 people near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.
“It’s been very scary — very, very scary,” said Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management incident commander Mark Roberts. “The folks that were in houses that were floating and didn’t know where they were — was one of the most tragic things our folks in the state (emergency operations center) have ever faced.”
Transportation and Public Facilities Commissioner Ryan Anderson said during Monday’s briefing that over 50 airports were impacted by the storm, with most assessed and reopened. The Kipnuk Airport runway suffered a large crack that was hampering access to the community, authorities said.
With so many people sheltering in schools, “conditions are expected to worsen in the next few days,” YKHC President Dan Winkelman said in a statement. “Thirty-seven homes in Kwigillingok were lost. We need immediate assistance from the State and federal governments to restore power and water, complete housing assessments, make the Kipnuk runway operational, and provide a significant amount of water, food, and supplies to those villages and others.”
[How to help residents and communities after catastrophic Western Alaska storm]
From Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta Regional Hospital housing in Bethel, Kipnuk resident Kristy Fox said she barely recognized her home village by Sunday afternoon when she sought safety from the rising water with her boyfriend and two of his children.
“Kipnuk doesn’t look like Kipnuk at all,” Fox said by phone Monday.
She and her boyfriend packed a few bags on Saturday night with some clothes, food and toiletries in case of evacuation. The lights went out around midnight. The water kept rising through Sunday morning.
It was knee-deep, Fox said, when the four of them left for the community shelter at the school — and she was surrounded by “crammed up” houses floating free of their foundations.
“The boardwalks were out of place and the houses were just everywhere out of place,” she said.
Two of the children, who have medical needs, had to be taken to Bethel, Fox said. A boat ferried her boyfriend’s wheelchair-bound son to the school, she said, before a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter brought them all to the hospital.
Fox said that while she’s unsure of what comes next, she’s thankful everyone in Kipnuk is accounted for. It doesn’t appear that her home or her boyfriend’s suffered too much damage.
“I’m just thankful we’re all OK,” she said. “Things can be replaced.”
A long-term crisis
Much of the Yukon-Kuskokwim region is sparsely populated and not accessible by road, complicating the ability to mount a swift response.
“This may end up being the largest off-the-road-system response for the National Guard in about 45 years,” said Alaska Military and Veterans Affairs Commissioner Torrence Saxe. That response would begin with establishing task forces in Nome, Kotzebue and Bethel.
“From there, we’ll do a hub and spoke system,” Saxe added.
On Monday, community representatives in villages including Nightmute and Napakiak reported dozens of homes and fish camps damaged, moved from their foundations or destroyed on a call with the Association of Village Council Presidents, which represents 48 communities in the Bethel and Kusilvak census areas.
Many of these homes lost housed multiple generations of families, according to YKHC officials.
In Kwigillingok, early reports indicated that virtually every home in the community had been damaged, according to communications shared with the dozens of emergency response workers and media on the call. At least 37 homes had drifted away in the floodwaters.
Communications with Kipnuk, a community of 700 people situated 98 miles southwest of Bethel near the Bering Sea coast, remained difficult on Monday, people on the call said.
Nightmute reported 17 homes affected by the storm, with some drifting off their foundations in floodwaters, roofing blown away, along with two businesses and 25 fish camp structures displaced or damaged.
In Napakiak, about 20 homes were knocked off their foundations, a community representative said on the call. People were sheltering at the school, but there was concern about dwindling water supplies. Floodwaters reached inside the store, but it wasn’t clear how bad the damage was.
People also reported lost subsistence foods, with freezers flooded and fish drying racks destroyed. Boardwalks were damaged in some communities.
Reports and video from the communities showed floodwaters sweeping homes from their foundations, as well as people injured by flying debris. Communities from Bethel to Toksook Bay also sustained damage from flooding and high winds.
People are still in emergency response and search and rescue mode, said Peter Evon, the president of AVCP’s Regional Housing Authority. It is clear that, in a region that already has some of the highest rates of housing overcrowding anywhere, the complete loss of dozens of homes and damage to untold others will be a long-term crisis.
Bethel, the regional hub, also has little open housing, Evon said. Repairing and rebuilding homes will not be quick.
“That process is going to take, literally, a couple years,” he said. “So people that are displaced, it’s not going to be just a couple of months. It is going to be lengthy.”
The Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp. is sending pallets of water, food and sanitation supplies like diapers, wipes and hand sanitizer to the hardest-hit communities, including Kipnuk, Kwigillingok, Tuntutuliak, Napakiak, Chefornak and Nightmute.
[Officials focus on rescue operations after Western Alaska storm with an eye toward long-term shelter]
‘An extreme event’
A dissipating typhoon moving into the Bering Sea is nothing new, said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate expert affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. But this storm system, after brewing near Japan, encountered record warm North Pacific Ocean surface water as it moved toward Alaska, supercharging the storm.
“Warm water along its virtually entire track gave it more energy than it otherwise would have,” he said. “There’s certainly a climate change connection there. Would this have happened without an overheated North Pacific? Entirely possible. Probably wouldn’t have been as strong as it wound up being.”
During a media briefing Monday, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy downplayed the role of climate change in the storm’s strength.
“Oftentimes, they call these incidents an act of God,” Dunleavy said, adding that he doesn’t “have the answer” to questions on the impact of climate change. “I think we just have to be prepared in Alaska for all kinds of disasters.”
State Sen. Lyman Hoffman, a Democrat who has represented the region in the Legislature for decades, said longtime residents of the area have witnessed the changing climate and its devastating impacts firsthand.
“There has been more and more warming that is disrupting lives” in the last 25 years, said Hoffman.
High water hit historic levels. Tides rose a record 6.6 feet above normal in Kipnuk, said meteorologist Joshua Ribail with the National Weather Service. In Kwigillingok, tides reached 6.3 feet above normal. Both are records.
That doesn’t mean tides reached 6.6 feet higher up the coastline than they usually would, Thoman said: It means vertical feet of water.
In the low-lying communities hit hardest, “the land is so close to sea level to start, there is very little room for getting through these big pushes of seawater and the level of the ocean rising in these big storms,” he said.
Communities reported high winds, including a top speed of 107 mph in Kusilvak, before sensors stopped working in the midst of the storm in some places.
“This was an extreme event,” Ribail said.
Waters are still higher than normal but no longer in flood stage as communities survey the wreckage and rescuers continue to search, he said. The forecast for Monday included breezy winds and fog.
Dunleavy added areas of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region to a previous disaster declaration issued Oct. 9 for a prior and damaging Bering Sea storm that hit the Northwest Arctic Borough. The designation makes people in the region eligible for state disaster recovery programs.
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