Joann Carl’s dog, Rocky, a long-eared, short-legged mix the color of graham crackers, has become famous in Alaska since I first met Carl in April. In recent months, she has seen her photo all over Facebook, she said, saved after Typhoon Halong destroyed more than half the homes in her coastal Alaska Native village of Kipnuk, population 700.
At the Anchorage Daily News, we’re based in Alaska’s largest city, but we travel as often as possible to small communities like Kipnuk to try to cover a state twice the size of Texas. We try to report more than one story at a time to justify the expense of plane tickets. Flights to a remote village in a small plane cost the same as a trip to New York. But we rarely have the chance to document a community simply Before the latest news is coming.
Maybe you haven’t heard much about the typhoon. It started as a tropical storm, dumping record rainfall in parts of Japan before swirling toward Alaska. By the time it reached our shores, the remnants of the storm still carried enough force to flood two villages, washing away homes and causing up to three deaths.
I’m writing about the storm because photojournalist Marc Lester and I visited Kipnuk shortly before the typhoon. Marc returned to cover the evacuation, providing a glimpse of an Alaskan village on the front lines of climate change just before and after the devastation.
The story of destruction in Carl’s hometown, as well as the nearby village of Kwigillingok, adds an exclamation point to long-held fears about the future of Alaska’s coastal villages. Which city will be the next to disappear? Where will climate refugees live? Should their old homes be rebuilt? If not, what does this mean for the future of these communities?
Emily Schwing, a reporter for KYUK Public Radio in Bethel and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, wrote in May about climate refugees the government helped move the Yup’ik village of Newtok. In November, while covering Alaska’s crumbling public school infrastructure, she wrote how the Kipnuk school housed hundreds of residents while emergency shelter during Halong storm surge.
When Marc and I visited this school for the first time in April, we were reporting on a very different story. Justine Paul, Carl’s son, spent seven years in prison for murder in Alaska’s frigid justice system, where serious cases can take a decade to resolve. Paul’s case was ultimately dismissed after the evidence against him was found to be deeply flawed. After battling addiction on the streets of Anchorage following his release, Paul returned to live with Carl in the small Kipnuk house where he grew up.
Our visit to their village before the storm gave Marc the opportunity to document a version of Kipnuk that no longer exists and may never exist again.
The people we met in the spring were then flown to emergency shelter during an unprecedented evacuation in the state. They arrived in Bethel by helicopters and small planes. Some remained in the regional center. Others were crowded side by side on the floor of a massive Alaska Air National Guard cargo plane bound for Anchorage. Many would end up staying for weeks in Anchorage in a convention center and sports arena converted into emergency shelters.
Five days after the storm, Marc visited Kipnuk in the back of an all-terrain vehicle with one of the few resistance fighters in the village.
Floodwaters devastated a community that, like others on the coast, settled in thawing permafrost. The central part of the village looked like a collapsed Jenga tower, with rectangular houses scattered and scattered, Marc reported. Most were lifted from their pilings by raging floodwaters and deposited elsewhere. Some were surprisingly intact, but muddy, soggy, compromised and unlivable where they left off. Gone was the hectic pace of normal life we had experienced earlier in the year, Marc discovered, replaced by a strange vacancy.
It had taken Carl’s family five hours to travel the three blocks from their house to the school’s makeshift shelter when the storm first hit. Raymond, Carl’s son, helped the elders get rid of the debris on the ground. Pieces of houses were swept against the city promenade. She said the whole village smelled of diesel fuel – spilled stove oil.
The villagers had to ration the food stored at the school for the students. “A cracker and a spoonful of hash browns” per person, Carl said. Eventually, volunteers collected dried native foods from houses still standing: fish, berries, moose meat.
“We fed more of the children and the men who were doing all the work, the rescues,” Carl said.
A volunteer pilot transported Rocky from Kipnuk to safety, she said. “She used her own gas. »
A house floated 15 miles away, Carl said. Bodies from some of Kipnuk’s air graves have been seen near the city’s airport.
The storm, whose impacts Alaska Climate Research Center later linked to global warming, killed Ella Mae Kashatok, 67, in Kwigillingok. The house she was in broke loose and floated toward the Bering Sea, state troopers said. Two members of his family, Vernon Pavil, 71, and Chester Kashatok, 41, have not been found.
Paul flew to Bethel and then to Togiak, a coastal village 140 miles from Kipnuk and less affected by storms. Carl, who suffers from diabetes, said she evacuated Kipnuk aboard a Blackhawk helicopter. She was sitting next to a 2-year-old girl whose name she did not know and who was traveling without her parents. Carl pretended to look out the window and appear interested in the scenery, she said, to keep the toddler occupied and calm.
Carl said Kipnuk’s subsistence culture made villagers uniquely equipped to survive the storm’s aftermath. Hunters regularly face life-or-death decisions, she said. The times of famine were not so long ago. The elders taught everyone how to dry and preserve food.
Carl, however, will probably no longer be around to experience this village lifestyle.
Although her house is one of the few that have survived – it was built in the late 1970s or early 1980s on stilts anchored deep in the tundra – she is not optimistic about returning to the village full time.
She burst into tears when asked if Kipnuk would exist in the future.
“This is probably the end,” she said over a recent lunch of Whoppers at an Anchorage Burger King. “It’s a ghost town.”
