Kwijelenjok, Alaska — Daryl John watched the last evacuees leave His village On the west coast of Alaska in helicopters and small planes they returned home, avoiding debris piled up on boardwalks over the swampy ground.
He is one of seven residents who chose to stay in Kuijelinguk after the remnants of Typhoon Halong devastated the village last month. Uprooting houses Many of them float miles away, and some have residents inside. One person was killed and two are still missing.
“I couldn’t leave my community,” John said while inside the town school, a shelter and command center where he helped solve problems in the aftermath of the storm.
But what will happen to this community and others affected by massive flooding – whether people, including John’s children, will return – is an open question come winter.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s office says the state’s focus is on repairing villages and supporting more than… 1,600 people were displaced. It may take 18 months. Hundreds of people live in temporary housing, many of them in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, where they must get used to a world very different from the subsistence lifestyle they are accustomed to.
Even with short-term fixes, residents wonder if their villages can do it Stay where they are As rising sea levels, erosion, thawing permafrost, and worsening storms threaten to submerge year after year. John hopes the repairs will help keep the community together long enough to come up with a plan to move the village.
Across the country, a few communities At risk due to human-caused global warming Steps have been taken to move, but they are very expensive and can take decades.
“A lot of people claimed they wouldn’t come back,” said Louise Ball, 35, a resident of Kipnock, the hardest-hit village, who was evacuated about 100 miles to the city of Bethel. “They didn’t want to do it again.” “Every fall, we have a flood. It may not be as severe as this one, but as the years go by, we’re having it. A warming climate is causing more storms, and they’re getting worse and worse.”
Where the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers enter the Bering Sea, it is one of the world’s largest river deltas — a low-lying area roughly the size of Alabama, with dozens of villages and a population of about 25,000.
For thousands of years the Athabascan and Yupik people were nomadic, following the seasons as they fished for salmon and hunted moose, walrus, seals, ducks and geese.
They settled in permanent villages around churches or schools after the arrival of missionaries and then the government. These villages are still far from the road network, being connected by plane, boat, all-terrain vehicles or snow machines in winter.
Floods have long been a problem. Strong winds can push high tides and even ice sheets to land. In the 1960s, tidal floods prompted some frustrated Kuijelinguk residents to establish another village, Kunjanak, about 10 miles (16 km) away.
As the climate changes, storms are becoming more intense. Shorter periods of ice coverage mean less protection from erosion. Melting permafrost undermines villages.
Kwijelenjok spent years seeking state and federal assistance, as well as working to raise some homes on pilings and move others to higher ground, according to a 2019 report by the Alaska Justice Institute. But that “high ground” is only about 3 feet (0.9 m) higher than the rest of the village in the flat, treeless tundra.
In Kipnok, the Kujakkatlik River is getting closer than ever. This year, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant to build a rock wall to reinforce the riverbank — a move recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2009 — amid the administration’s efforts to cut government spending.
He said about 144 indigenous communities in Alaska face threats due to rising temperatures 2024 report From the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. The report found that over the next 50 years, about $4.3 billion will be needed to mitigate the damage.
Moving villages is not an easy task. Newtok began planning in the mid-1990s and only moved its last residents to the new city MirtarvikNorthwest of Kuijelinguk last year. The relocation cost more than $160 million in state and federal funds.
Harry Friend has lived through many floods in Kuijelinguk in his 65 years, but none quite like what the remnants of Typhoon Halong brought on the night of October 11. Other homes, torn from the ground, crushed his home before floating up the river. The Coast Guard recovered dozens of survivors from rooftops.
“When the water started flowing, my house was floating, shaking, floating, shaking,” he said. The next morning, his older sisters and brother, who lived next door, were gone.
His family settled with relatives in a nearby village, but he returned to see what he could salvage and to retrieve his rifles so he could hunt.
Unattached houses are spread across the plains like game pieces on a board. One of the buildings rested on its corrugated metal roof and shook in the wind. Others hit the wooden walkways. The coffins in the above-ground graves were swept away.
But crews arrived with large bulldozers of soil, gravel and other materials brought by barges. Some residents have returned to help, such as repairing boardwalks, recovering coffins or righting overturned fishing boats.
Rebuilding effortsRepair work, which includes fixing water and fuel lines, will continue as long as weather permits, said Jeremy Zedek, a state emergency management spokesman.
Kwijelenjok resident Neti Ejkorak stayed behind to cook traditional food for the workers, search crews and remaining residents. The school refrigerator is running, and it’s full of moose meat.
“I knew I had to stay and cook for them because they had no one,” she said.
The friend has since returned to his family. He could not stay home for the winter: a power outage had ruined his stock of seal, walrus, moose, and beluga whale. Because the storm forced salt water from the Bering Sea into the village, there is little access to fresh water.
He knows the village will likely need to be moved.
“This is our land,” the friend said. “You should go home.”
About 500 miles (800 km) away, Darryl John of Kipnock – no relation to the Darryl John who remained in Kwiegelinuk – realizes that his idyllic living may be over.
“We’ll probably never go home,” he said, taking a break from filling out requests for help at a shelter in Anchorage.
Like other residents, he was flown twice — first to the regional center in Bethel, then to Anchorage when shelters in Bethel became too crowded. He and his family are staying in a hotel room.
They had left their home and gone to the village school when the water rose at two in the morning. When he returned, she was gone, along with his shack full of refrigerators full of berries, fish, moose, and seals.
He took a boat, found his house far upriver, and retrieved some clothes and birth certificates.
As they were being airlifted, he saw that most of the graves in the village cemetery had disappeared. He felt like he was abandoning his late mother and brother.
Anchorage has its advantages: “Flushing toilets, we don’t have them back home,” he said.
But to hunt, he now needs permits and animals to be in season, foreign obstacles for subsistence hunters.
He will need a job – but what?
“I have no idea,” John said. “This wasn’t a plan to be here.”
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Johnson reported from Seattle and Bohrer from Juneau, Alaska.
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