KYUK - Bethel

A Tuluksak man remains missing. Walter Hawk, 43, walked away from his village almost a full month ago.

Tuluksak Search and Rescue last spotted him over the weekend, about 10 miles upriver from the village. Search and Rescue member Nelson Napoka said when Hawk saw the boat and heard the group shouting his name, he ran away.

Search and Rescue has seen Hawk several times since he left town, but each time he’s disappeared before they could reach him. Napoka said the searchers tie food in the trees at each place they spot the elusive man, last time, leaving dry fish, spam, crackers, and juice.

Nastaia Hawk, Walter’s sister, said this stretch is the longest her brother has been missing. She said he often tries to walk to Anchorage, but he’s always come home within four days. As of Wednesday, he’s been missing 28 days.

Napoka said when the search team last spotted Hawk, he was wearing the same blue sweater he’d left town in, and though he looked dirty, he did not appear sick or injured. Napoka noted that for now, there’re plenty of berries and greens on the tundra for Hawk to eat.

Search and Rescue goes out looking for the missing man every few days.

The national opioid epidemic gives no exception to rural Alaska.

The U.S. Surgeon General will release a report on substance abuse addiction and health later this year.

To prepare, the nation’s top medical officer is meeting with health care providers around the country on ways to prevent or treat opioid addiction.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy traveled last week to Napaskiak, a town of 500, located 7 miles down the Kuskokwim river from Bethel, to learn how the opioid epidemic is affecting the small Alaska village, but Larson has other issues on his mind.

“We have a water and sewer haul system, and like 40 percent of the home system is not working,” he said. “And we’re having problems with sanitation.”

Larson’s list continues.

Alcohol-related problems like public drunkenness and domestic violence have increased since Bethel opened a liquor store, he said.

“Another issue that we’re facing today is suicide,” he said. “We have like 500 people, and we lose one person every year.”

He attributes the deaths to not enough jobs, cultural ties between elders and young people unraveling, and drugs.

“But it’s been around for a long time, the alcohol and drug abuse,” he said. “I think there’s more of it today.”

The Surgeon General came to talk with Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation about the heroin treatment program it’s developing.

Opioids can often lead to heroin once the opioid prescription runs out or gets too expensive.

On the clinical side, the health corporation offers offering Narcan, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids and can reverse an overdose. It is also closely monitoring how many opioids it’s prescribing and for how long. On the behavioral health side, the health corporation heavily relies on tele-medicine. That’s when a patient talks to a counselor through a TV screen.

Murthy sees this technology, combined with drugs like Narcan, holding the greatest hope for rural communities such Napakiak for accessing substance treatment.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s office will release a report later this year on treating substance abuse addiction.

Surgeon General reports— such as the 1964 report on tobacco— have a history of changing government policy and health care.

After four days without power to half the town, the village of Aniak’s electricity was restored Saturday afternoon.

Power returned within hours of the initial outage for half of the town, but the other half was left to deal with freezers full of thawing food.

Laura Simeon, the tribal administrator in Aniak, lost power and she said outages like this have happened several times already this year, though never for this long.

“My big concern is what if this had happened during the winter?” she said. “A lot of the housing here, especially in the housing areas, they run from heating boards or from monitors and those run from electricity.”

Simeon charged her phone at a neighbors house during the outage and started making calls to connect people without power to freezers and showers that they could use.

“People from downtown had space available in their freezers for people that needed to move some of their fish and meat they had stored,” Simeon said.

The school district pitched in with their industrial freezers, and Simeon said she thinks little food was lost in the end, but after this outage she doesn’t have much faith in the power company.

“It’s kinda sad when you have a sudden power outage and your own electric company don’t know or cannot locate the problem,” Simeon said.

Darlene Holmberg, manager at the power station, says residents don’t understand how difficult the process was to identify and fix the problem.

The cause of the outage was an electrical line under the airport runway that had a short, Holmberg said.

“They’re hard to locate when they’re underground,” she said. “You have an idea from point A to point B, but you can’t always pinpoint the point that needs repair.”

Holmberg, who didn’t lose power in her own home, is sympathetic toward the other half of the village, but also says that there is nothing the electric company could have done differently.

As for Simeon, she’s advising people to buy a generator.

Nine applications for a position as Bethel’s next city manager have arrived since the job notice went public last month.

Bethel City Council members are meeting every Friday at noon until they fill the position. Last Friday marked the first of these meetings.

The search that brought us departing city manager Ann Capela took six months.

Mayor Rick Robb doesn’t know if the city is in for another long haul.

“It took a long time,” Robb said. “Ideally, in a perfect world, we would have a city manager hired before our current one leaves, or at the same time the current one leaves.”

City Manager Capela is leaving her three-year contract more than a year early on Sept. 23 without penalty after what she says has been a physical struggle with the Arctic climate.

The mayor said a local hire would be great.

“It’s been mentioned a lot of times,” Robb said. “We’re interested if we had more local applicants, people who actually live here, and/or people who are more familiar with Alaska. I’d definitely like to see that.”

So far, he’s only seen one.

The city manager serves as the chief executive officer of the city and oversees all city department heads under the supervision of city council.

“We’re looking for leadership experience, experience in handling budgets and personnel and operations,” Robb said.

The deadline to apply is August 24, but that period could be extended if no candidate is hired beforehand.

The Friday meetings are open to the public.

The city of Bethel has gotten an extension on its regional general permit from the Army Corps of Engineers that will allow the city to review permits for citizens building in a wetland, a designation which encompasses much of Bethel.

Mayor Rick Robb addressed corps representatives at a city council meeting Tuesday with a clear message.

“It is definitely the intention of this community and the intention of this council that we want to work and extend this general permit and have it authorized for another five year period, and we want to make sure the corps of engineers understands that,” he said.

The permit, set to expire at the end of August, will be extended for six months as per the council’s request. In that time, city administration will work with the corps to renew the city’s permit on a long-term basis, but the renewal is not guaranteed. State and federal authorities still have to weigh in on the process, and will have the option to veto its passage.

Sheila Newman, one of the corps representatives, pointed out that despite public concern for widespread construction holdups, the permit was used just a handful of times last year and affected only six out of 75 total projects in Bethel.

The search continues for a man who walked away from the village of Tuluksak 15 days ago.

On Monday, Tuluksak Search and Rescue spotted Walter Hawk, 43, who troopers describe as a “vulnerable adult.” A group had boated 9 miles up the Tuluksak River when they spied Hawk a couple miles offshore through binoculars. Night was approaching, and the missing man was too far away for the group to reach before dark.

Search and Rescue Member Jacob Napoka says the group decided to camp out for the night rather than shout at Hawk and potentially scare him away.

“These old people told us not to holler at him or he might run away, but quietly walk to him,” Napoka said.

But when morning came, Hawk had disappeared.

Before Hawk went missing he’d told a friend he was leaving to pick berries but didn’t say where he was going. Napoka says the berries are what’s keeping Hawk alive.

“Yeah, he’s okay, because there’s lots of berries up there—lots of blueberries, blackberries,” Napoka said.