Month: March 2026

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 Tuesday 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.”

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-Kuskowim 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. About 100 of those gravesite contents have since been recovered, but “some are still unaccounted for,” she said.

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.

Federal changes

In a keynote address at the conference, the state’s top emergency manager called ex-Typhoon Halong the worst event he has experienced in the 32 years he has been responding to disasters in the state. 

“This is the most severe disaster that I’ve responded to in my entire career,” Bryan Fisher, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management,  told the conference audience on Tuesday.

Damages were worse than those inflicted in 2022 by another ex-typhoon, Merbok, which reached a wider region, he said. The Halong response required “the largest domestic evacuation of Alaskans in state history, even more, we believe, than evacuations that were accomplished during World War II.”

Fisher acknowledged that the residents’ ongoing displacement puts them in a degree of limbo and adds several daily challenges. And he acknowledged that the general U.S. disaster-assistance system, designed for the nation as a whole, is not always suited to rural Alaska needs.

That is particularly the case for traditional subsistence needs, he said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency can provide money to replace gear lost from subsistence camps, “but they can’t provide funding to rebuild the cabin,” he said.

But there is some good news out of Washington, D.C., about disaster response and prevention efforts.

FEMA has now reinstated the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, known as BRIC, which dispersed grants for projects aimed at preparing for and mitigating disaster impacts. That reinstatement was in compliance with a March 6 order issued by a federal court in Massachusetts.

That is a big victory for Alaska, Fisher said, even though Alaska was not among the 22 states that sued over cancellation of the BRIC program and the grants made by it. The lawsuit, filed last year, was led by officials in the state of Washington.

“Without that funding, my agency was really at a loss,” Fisher said. “We really relied on that funding. So it’s great news that that has been turned back on.”

With Kristi Noem as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FEMA canceled the entire BRIC program, including already awarded grants to states and tribal governments. Noem was particularly critical of grants aimed at providing resilience to climate change effects.

“Under Secretary Noem, DHS is eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters,” said a statement issued by FEMA on April 4, 2025.

Now, under new department leadership and at the court’s direction, FEMA has committed to paying grants. On Wednesday, FEMA announced the availability of $1 billion in funding for resilience projects.

Fisher said Alaska will benefit from another change: the appointment of Markwayne Mullin to replace controversy-plagued Kristi Noem as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Mullin, who served for three years as a U.S. senator representing Oklahoma, is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

“I think it’s an incredible win for the state of Alaska, that we have somebody with a Native background that’s going to be the Secretary of Homeland Security,” Fisher told the conference audience. “He understands the reality of doing business as sovereign tribal governments with the federal government, and I think he’s going to be a great advocate for all of you, for all of us, moving forward.”