Inside a modest home on a quiet snow-covered street in Emmonak, water boils and turns into steam.
Yolanda Kelly heats water to bathe her son and granddaughter.
“I make my hot water on the stove, and I put it in the tub, and I give them a bath as much as I can,” Kelly said.
When asked how long it had been, Kelly said “My granddaughter, maybe three or four days.”
On Monday, a fire disabled Emmonak’s sewage treatment plant, leaving the city unable to provide sewer service to hundreds of homes in the village.
The city is racing to fix its damaged water and sewer system before the pipes freeze for good, a battle with the quickly approaching winter that the city is up against.
The city does have running water now, as long as the pipes don’t freeze, but the problem is that they can’t use drains and sewer lines to get rid of waste water or human waste.
Some people resort to using bucket-style, dry toilets.
“We’re using a honey bucket. You can just smell that as soon as you wake up, and it’s constantly there,” Kelly said.
When talking about how this makes her feel, she laughs a little.
“Like we’re living in the old days,” Kelly said.
When she was growing up, her family used honey buckets, and she doesn’t want that for her kids.
She isn’t the only one.
“We got no bathrooms, so we got to go back to the old days, back to the ’60s and ’70s,” said Albert Westlock, an ivory carver by trade who works from home and watches his nieces and nephews while their parents are at work.
He shows off a fossilized saber-toothed tiger tusk and some mammoth bones.
He likes old things, and doesn’t mind old ways.
“To this day I hardly ever take showers, cause I didn’t grow up taking showers,” he said. “I only took hot steam baths. That’s what I’m used to.”
Westlock said that if the pipes do freeze and he can’t get water, it won’t be the end of the world for him. He could go back to hauling water and cutting ice from the river as they did in the old days. However, his nieces and nephews are having a harder time.
“It’s pretty hard on these little kids, you know,” he said. “They’re not used to what we went through a long time ago.”
Family members are now making regular trips to Wesklock’s steam bath.
Despite his old fashioned ways, he wants the plant to start working again soon, just like everyone else.
The sewer plant is 20 yards away. Inside, it’s dark, with wires lying exposed on the floors. The smell of burnt plastic and metal lingers. The center of the room is charred black.
Jamie Awgika, the employee who found the fire, stands in the ash, looking at ruined machinery.
The night of the fire, Awgika’s toilet wasn’t flushing at home, which tipped him off that something was wrong.
“Put on my stuff and came right up, and I noticed there was a fire coming off of vacuum pump number one,” he said. “It wasn’t on fire, only the ceiling was on fire.”
“I was devastated. I couldn’t believe it happened,” Awgika said. “Scared, wondering what to do. I only had one fire extinguisher, and I used it.”
The fire might have burned the entire building had Awgika not come to investigate, and things would be a lot worse.
“The first time, I caught it just in time when I came in,” he said.
This has happened before.
Awgika said this time was the worst, and his boss Arthur Redfox agrees.
This is the third fire in 10 years. The manufacturer of the pumps is called Bush, a German company that Emmonak was in the process of replacing when the fire happened.
Pumps like these are prone to overheating when residents don’t notice vacuum leaks, but they are not supposed to catch on fire.
They’re suppose to shut off when something like this happens, but they don’t.
Or it least they didn’t here.
Despite the faulty equipment, the city is not pursuing legal action.
It’s moving on, and it’s doing it as quickly as it can with repairs were already underway Wednesday morning.
On Tuesday, the Council approved $20,000 to fix the roof of the plant, a first step before replacing a burned-out pump, which caused the fire.
City Manager Martin Moore says this cannot wait.
“The immediate problem is the families,” Moore said. “The families need to have potable water; they need to flush their toilets; and they need to flush the water from the bathtub and showers to the lagoon.”
The contractor estimates three days fix the roof, but Moore says the whole operation could be out of commission for weeks and this worries him.
“If the repair work for the vacuum pump is not done in time, it’s possible that the pipes at the west end and at the east end of town, which provides close to 300 homes, will probably freeze,” Moore said. “And if it freezes, it will become a major disaster.”
If a freeze happens, Moore guesses, then it could take months to fix. And then there would be another problem.
“We don’t have any money to repair the damages if that were to happen.”
Moore said it could cost more than $1 million and the village would have to go to the state to declare an emergency disaster.
Emmonak has gotten some relief funds already from the Alaska Native Health Consortium: $5,000 for the roof. And the village has requested help from the Rasmuson Foundation. Moore just hopes it will come in time.
As the steam rises from boiling pots, and the ice grows on the river, and the sun sets on Emmonak.
