KYUK - Bethel

Inside a large warehouse past the concessions counter at Bethel’s movie theater, social workers with the Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) tape closed boxes of relief supplies.

“Kasigluk, Kong[iganak], Napaskiak, Tunt[tutuliak], Chefornak, Newtok, Tununak, Toksook [Bay],” said Meghan Crow, the district’s lead social worker, listing off communities where the boxes were headed.

Most of the communities suffered serious damage from the remnants of Typhoon Halong. All have been housing families that were evacuated.

“In the big boxes, we’ve got child sandals, woolen blankets, two boxes each of adult winter coats going out to each site, snack boxes like chips and granola bars and beef jerky, diapers, wipes, formula, bottles,” Crow said.

Crow said even before the storm, one of her key roles for the district was ensuring equal access to educational opportunities for students who have lost housing. With Halong, that number has shot up. More than 130 students have re-enrolled in schools in Bethel and across LKSD.

The dozens of pallets that Crow’s group has broken down for distribution came from thousands of miles away through a Louisiana-based nonprofit, the United Cajun Navy. The district is using federal funds for items it still needs to get students through the winter. Crow says that not only means outdoor gear, but some precious indoor gear as well.

“The next round is basketball shoes everyone’s asking for,” Crow said.

With supplies mostly checked off, Crow said her department’s priority is helping students adjust to their changed reality. Many affected families across the region still need essentials for daily living.

Getting relief to the right place

Standing in a city-owned garage in Bethel, Maggie Coit said there is plenty to go around.

“We have sleeping bags, pads, and for a while we had mattresses, but I believe those all went out yesterday,” Coit said. “That looks like masks, like surgical masks, Clorox wipes here, paper towels, toilet paper, and then what we like to call the leaning tower of diapers.”

Coit is with the veteran-led nonprofit Team Rubicon. She said the garage has filled up and emptied of goods multiple times during the relief effort.

Coit said Team Rubicon has been working closely with the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) to more precisely meet the needs of communities.

“We work with the requests directly from the villages so that we are not sending goods that are not helpful or extraneous. We really are working to make sure things don’t simply become trash later on,” Coit said.

Robert Rey had also been busy coordinating with an alphabet soup of organizations in Bethel to get relief supplies to the right place.

“Probably left with another what’s out here, plus on the floor, probably another 16,000 pounds of clothes, food, and gear,” Rey said, standing in the center of an airplane hangar owned by a local charter service.

The hangar is being used to store goods that Rey’s employer, Yute Commuter Service, has paid to have freighted into Bethel, so far on its own dime, and distributed to villages. In the hangar, Rey and other volunteers have set up a one-stop shop for anyone in need – among the stockpile, new socks and underwear, piles of sweaters and blankets, canned goods, and bags of pet food.

“It’s not just people that have been affected by the typhoon. It’s also Bethel residents that are hard on their luck. You know, SNAP didn’t get re put up. Some folks are out of jobs. It’s getting cold. They’re freezing out there,” Rey said.

The rebuild effort

The cold weather is an immediate concern for villages hit hardest by the storm. In Bethel, literal tons of building supplies are being sent out as quickly as they arrive.

Alaska Army National Guard Sgt. Matthew Karols has been overseeing logistics at a giant warehouse on the Bethel riverfront. It was long ago a fish processing plant full of Kuskokwim River salmon. Now, it’s filled with the things that it takes to rebuild a village.

“I know we’ve sent out last week, I think it was 560 bundles of insulation. A rough count is about 800 sheets of plywood, and that was just from the one order we had for Napakiak,” Karols said.

Karols makes sure supply orders get where they need to go – first to the Bethel Readiness Center, and then on the flight line at the National Guard Armory to be loaded into Chinook helicopters. Senior Airman Scott Nord has been overseeing that part of the process.

“This is definitely, I don’t know if it’s the appropriate term, but the bottleneck, because everything has to go here before it gets out,” Nord said, standing outside the Guard hangar among giant bundles of plywood known as bunks.

“They can take three bunks in one flight and still have payload to spare. That’s with the crew, and then they’ll throw insulation on top as space permits,” Nord said.

Nord said three to four loads of supplies have been leaving Bethel daily via helicopter. The aim is to have Guard personnel on the ground in four communities at a time assisting with immediate infrastructure needs. He said the level of support, especially from organizations based in Bethel, has stuck with him.

“There’s been a huge turnout from locals that have come to offer time, equipment, and materials of their own to push out to the villages and help where they can,” Nord said. “They’ve shown up out of nowhere and offered their help for exactly what we needed.”

Across the region, homes are being dried out and repositioned, boardwalks pieced back together, and critical infrastructure needed for the winter is being prioritized for repairs. Alongside the Guard, a slew of agencies and vendors have been contracted for the rebuild effort.

A full picture of the amount of state and federal disaster assistance is still unavailable. The state says the effort to calculate the costs of rebuilding and begin processing reimbursements has only begun. From the ground in Bethel one thing is clear: the recovery effort is enormous.

On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq’ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 in the heart of western Alaska’s sprawling Kuskokwim River delta.

“I couldn’t make it up. I tried, but the wind was too strong to try and go by boat, so we ended up staying on the bridge for five hours,” Amik said. Things only grew more dramatic. “The houses started drifting away around 5:30 a.m.,” Amik said. “There was still lights in them; there was people in them.”

When they set out, the couple were heading to Kipnuk’s public school, the largest building in the Alaska Native Yup’ik village. At least that building, they hoped at the time, would be secure.

The storm that hit Alaska’s west coast in mid-October was the remnants of Typhoon Halong, which picked up momentum in a warmer-than-normal Pacific Ocean. After the wind died down and the floodwaters receded, the village lay in ruins. But while the school still stood relatively unscathed on its steel pilings more than 20 feet above the muck and wreckage, there were other problems inside. District staff had been working on much-needed upgrades to its main generator. Then the school’s backup generator sputtered. Everyone in the community, including Amik and his girlfriend, stayed for two days until local leaders decided the storm had done too much damage and organized a mass evacuation.

When disaster strikes, public school buildings are integral as safe havens in hundreds of predominantly Indigenous villages scattered across Alaska’s vast landscape. In many remote communities, schools are some of the only buildings with flush toilets and their own generators. Schools are often the only buildings that stand on pilings — important amid the rising waters of climate change — and also the only buildings large enough to house dozens, if not hundreds, of people for days at a time.

“It is a known fact that if you need to evacuate, you evacuate to the elementary school,” said Alaska state Sen. Löki Tobin, a Democrat and chair of the Senate Education Committee, who grew up in Nome but now represents Anchorage.

“Those are lifeboats,” said Alaska’s emergency management director, Bryan Fisher. “They’re the last place of refuge.”

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican and former educator, has declared more than a dozen disasters since August 2024, and in at least half of those cases, public schools were used as emergency shelters. The state reported damage in 52 communities in October, and the impacts forced hundreds of residents to sleep in gymnasiums and on classroom floors in rural public schools. Since 1998, Alaska has seen more than 140 state-declared disasters, and dozens of those required schools to function as shelters.

But Alaska’s rural schools have been neglected for decades. Earlier this year, ProPublica, KYUK Public Media, and NPR documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. In some cases, the buildings that function as safe havens in times of emergency are becoming emergencies themselves.

The state is required by law to fund construction and maintenance projects in rural school districts because they serve unincorporated communities where there is no tax revenue to help fund education. In the last 28 years, Alaska’s rural school districts have made close to 1,800 requests to the state for money to maintain and repair deteriorating schools, but only 14% of those requests have been approved. And as the backlog of major maintenance projects continues to grow, the state budget has been shrinking.

“Just the maintenance that goes in every day to keep up a building, that’s really where the flaw is,” said Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop. For years, her department has struggled to meet the growing need for dollars to maintain school facilities, including more than 60 owned by the state. “The crux of the situation,” she said during an interview in Juneau last year, is that “we get to an emergency because we didn’t take care of it.”

The main generator that provides power to the school in Kipnuk was not working before hundreds of residents fled there during ex-typhoon Halong. Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew “Hannibal” Anderson said the generator “was working well enough to provide what it needed for the school.” But it was quickly overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for power once the school became Kipnuk’s primary emergency shelter. A smaller backup generator also couldn’t meet that demand to charge cellphones and keep the building heated after the community’s residents piled in.

The school district waited 14 years for the state to approve funding to do a major renovation in 2015, but it has not asked for funding since then. Every year, the applications school districts submit for construction and maintenance funds are ranked. Data analysis and interviews with superintendents across the state indicate that submitting an application that ranks high enough to win funding is cumbersome, and they feel pressure to include professional inspections and surveys, which can be expensive. Anderson explained that although the generator required maintenance, he believed Kipnuk’s needs wouldn’t be considered urgent enough to receive funding. “Kipnuk is a relatively new school,” he said.

In Kotlik, a village of just over 650 residents almost 220 miles north of Kipnuk, 70 people spent two nights at the school. “We have a church and a community building, but those are seldom used in evacuations,” explained Principal Cassius Brown. “That’s because the school is situated higher and it’s not as close to the river.”

Since 2018, the Lower Yukon School District has made annual requests ranging from $2 million to more than $5 million to the state’s education department to make extensive repairs to the school in Kotlik and another in a nearby village. That work remains unfunded.

In Chevak, where about 950 Alaska Native Cup’ik people live less than a dozen miles from the Bering Sea coast, school Principal Lillian Olson said 65 people spent a few nights on the gymnasium floor. “Our community is kind of dependent on the school for shelter,” Olson said. “One time, two years ago, we had an electric outage in one part of town that lasted for like a week, and because the houses didn’t have electricity and no heat, we housed them.”

Olson said a test of the building’s fire sprinklers failed in September. In a phone call last spring, Kashunamiut School District Superintendent Jeanne Campbell described a host of problems related to the Chevak school’s boiler and broken water pipes that impacted the fire sprinkler system. “And that’s just inside the building,” Campbell said.

In 2024, the Kashunamiut School District made its first request to the state’s education department since 2001, asking for $32 million to update and renovate the school. The proposal was one among 114 for fiscal year 2025. The state allocated enough money for only 17 of those projects. Work at the Chevak school was not one of them.

Just over a dozen miles west, in Hooper Bay, Mayor Charlene Nukusuk said between 50 and 60 people sheltered for two nights in that community’s public school. The village’s location makes it extremely vulnerable. Over the last few decades, fall coastal storms have devoured several rows of sand dunes that used to protect the community of 1,375 people. Now, the black and frigid Bering Sea laps at the beach only a few hundred feet from the far corner of the local airport runway. Nukusuk said that the school is one of the safest buildings.

Hooper Bay’s school was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 2006. Since then, the district has made 29 funding requests totaling more than $8.4 million in needed repairs to the state for a range of projects on the school including roofing, emergency lighting, and siding. In 2024, the district received money for one of those — just under $2.3 million for “exterior repairs,” according to state data. The superintendent did not respond to questions about specific needs in Hooper Bay.

Alaska’s emergency management division does not have formal agreements with the state’s education department designating schools as emergency shelters, and neither agency has funding to help maintain schools specifically as emergency shelters. However, a division spokesperson said there are some state grants that schools could access for emergency preparedness.

“Schools are built for educational purposes — other uses are incidental or secondary to design,” education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis wrote in an email. He said no one from the education department visits schools “to ascertain whether a facility is in condition to serve as an emergency shelter.”

“I don’t know if people necessarily correlated together that if you’re going to use schools as multipurpose facilities, that you also have to maintain them for those purposes,” said Tobin, the state senator. “They’re not just institutions of learning. They’re also institutions of after-school activities, of community gatherings, and of evacuation facilities and disaster preparedness support infrastructure,” she said.

@georgebrightsrThis shows that no matter what hardship this village is going through they have a gathering of praise to our Lord Jesus♬ original sound – George

In February 2024, Tobin, who also sits on the state senate’s Military and Veterans Affairs finance subcommittee, put the question of funding schools for emergencies to Craig Christenson, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, during a budget meeting.

Alaska’s emergency management division falls under Christenson’s department. “From my understanding,” Tobin said to him, “if the school wasn’t available in some of these very small, rural, remote areas, we would be paying to evacuate people, versus using an asset that we have already put resources into but have already failed to maintain. Is that accurate?”

“I can’t comment on failing to maintain them,” Christenson responded. “Our department does not maintain schools.” (The deputy commissioner declined to comment further on last year’s meeting.)

“But you do utilize them?” Tobin asked.

“We do,” Christenson said.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

As residents boarded air transports out of Kipnuk on Wednesday, Oct. 15, they were leaving what remained of their houses, belongings, and ancestral homeland behind. For many, that list also included their pet dogs.

The remnant of Typhoon Halong ravaged Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta communities on Oct. 12, leaving the coastal village of Kipnuk among the hardest hit. Flood waters swept whole homes miles from their foundations and state officials say nearly every building has suffered flood damage.

Community members sheltered in Kipnuk’s school building until many voluntarily evacuated to Bethel or Anchorage. But animals were not permitted on the National Guard and Army helicopters out of the community.

Bethel-based dog rescue Bethel Friends of Canines (BFK9) sprang into action, looking for a way to evacuate the animals left behind.

Jesslyn Elliot is the director of the Bethel-based nonprofit dog rescue. She said that as of Friday, Oct. 17, the organization was caring for about 70 displaced dogs, most of them rescued in bush planes.

“We’re slowly but steadily getting the numbers down in Kipnuk,” said Elliot.

BFK9 coordinated with school teachers that had stayed behind in the village, who rounded up the dogs to help them evacuate.

Elliot said pilots from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Ryan Air, and DeHaan Aviation quickly responded to BFK9’s call for aviation support.

Elliot said that about 10 dogs from the village of Kwigillingok evacuated with residents in National Guard helicopters and are also now under BFK9’s care. She said there are more pets there. She said late in the week, BFK9 had still been working to establish a point person who could assist in plane evacuations out of Kwigillingok. As of Saturday, Oct. 18, BFK9 announced that it was beginning to charter flights to Kwigillingok.

Elliot said that most of the rescued dogs’ families have been identified, though some were surrendered after the storm or are strays. Some have been reunited with their families in Bethel or are being fostered by extended family. Other dogs have been sent to foster homes in Anchorage to help expand Bethel’s capacity for future dog evacuations.

Right now, it’s a matter of managing BFK9’s sheltering capacity before another round of evacuations can begin.

“We’re pretty full, but people have stepped up,” Elliot said. “Quite a few people stopped in and were like, ‘Let me take a dog,’ you know. And that has worked out the best. Just stopping by and saying, ‘What can I do?'”

Other individual efforts to evacuate dogs from flood-impacted communities are underway. Independent pilot Jeanine Faulker has flown to hard-hit communities and evacuated planefuls of dogs, some she’s sheltering in her home.

Pilot Nate DeHaan co-operates DeHaan Aviation and flew with BFK9 to Kipnuk on the evening of Wednesday, Oct. 15. DeHaan said that they arrived just hours after the community had been evacuated.

“You [could] start to see that debris field from a long ways away,” DeHaan described. “And then you get closer, and you realize that the debris field is partially made up of buildings and people’s houses, and they’re a long way from the village.”

DeHaan said that it was clear that people had recently fled. He described left-behind four-wheelers parked across from the airport.

“The airport ramp was just scattered with people’s boots, with their rubber boots that they had left behind, you know, right before they got on the transport taking them out of there,” DeHaan said.

DeHaan loaded air kennels filled with dogs of all sizes onto the plane.

“My prior experience flying a large number of dogs was flying sled dogs after the [Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race],” DeHaan said. “So this was a little different, because these dogs weren’t necessarily tired and had a little more energy.”

Once in Bethel, dogs have been housed at the BFK9 kennel or in foster homes. In some cases, evacuees in Bethel were able to reunite with their pets.

“What it would mean for all these displaced families to get reconnected with a little piece of their home that they’ve had to leave behind, I can’t even imagine,” DeHaan said.

Elliot said that teachers in Kipnuk are still feeding and looking out for the few dogs that remain until future evacuations can take place.

Elliot said that Bethel Friends of Canines is calling for volunteers in Bethel to help the shelter manage dogs and supplies. It’s also in need of dog bowls and flight kennels, and is accepting dog food donations to send to other storm-impacted communities. Elliot said that anyone can bring supplies by the shelter or leave them on the porch.

Bethel Friends of Canines is also accepting monetary donations through its website that will support its ongoing evacuation efforts.

In Anchorage, at the Alaska Federation of Natives conference on Saturday, Oct. 18, Sen. Lisa Murkowski spoke of her visit to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the aftermath of ex-typhoon Halong. After visiting the emergency shelter in Bethel’s National Guard Armory, she took a Chinook helicopter to survey Kipnuk’s damage.

Murkowski said that she brought two loose dogs from the village back with her to foster, who she’s temporarily named “Kipnuk” and “Chinook.” She plans to reunite the dogs with their owners.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

This story was produced with contribution from Nat Herz at KYUK.

A woman has been found dead in Kwigillingok, two days after a devastating storm hit the Kuskokwim Delta coast.

The woman’s name has not been released publicly. Alaska State Troopers say they’re working to notify her next of kin.

Reached by phone Monday evening, spokesperson Austin McDaniel said troopers are actively searching for two people who are still missing from Kwigillingok.

Kwigillingok was one of the hardest-hit communities in the Oct. 11 storm. Kipnuk, roughly 30 miles west, was also battered by high winds and record-breaking flooding, but troopers say everyone from that community has been accounted for.

Dozens of evacuees from the two communities are arriving in Bethel, according to the regional tribal healthcare provider. They’re being housed at Bethel’s National Guard Armory, which has been turned into a 100-bed shelter.

This is a developing story and may be updated with additional information.

At least three people were still missing Monday, and 51 had been rescued from two Southwest Alaska communities hit hardest by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, according to the Alaska National Guard.

The massive storm flooded communities and destroyed homes Sunday when it slammed into the coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, bringing with it destructive winds and high waters. Officials have said that the hardest hit communities appear to be Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and Napakiak.

In an update Monday, the Guard said rescue teams from multiple agencies searched storm-impacted communities throughout the night. The storm blew and floated at least a dozen houses off of their foundations, some with families still inside.

As of Monday morning, U.S. Coast Guard and Alaska Air and Army National Guard aircraft had rescued 51 people and two dogs from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. Three people were medically evacuated from Kipnuk to Bethel for medical care.

The three people unaccounted for are from Kwigillingok, the Guard said. Additional details were not immediately available Monday. Search efforts continued.

According to the National Weather Service, the wind had mellowed by Monday morning, as the storm moved north into the Beaufort Sea.

Carson Jones, lead forecaster with the Weather Service’s Anchorage office, said weather in the areas hit hardest over the weekend had returned to normal for fall on Alaska’s west coast.

“Kind of isolated rain showers, some snow showers, up farther north into the northwest area there, but throughout the Kuskokwim Delta, we’re mid-40s, light winds and isolated rain showers,” Jones said. “So the weather has calmed down significantly for those communities.”

Monday morning, Jones said, the storm was hitting the North Slope, where Prudhoe Bay and Deadhorse were seeing wind gusting up to about 40 miles per hour.

The Guard asked anyone in need of immediate rescue to contact the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center at 907-551-7230. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has scheduled a news conference for 1 p.m. Monday with numerous state and federal officials. It will be live-streamed on the governor’s Facebook page.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Twenty-four-year-old Charitie Ropati is Yup’ik and Samoan, and has roots in the Bering Sea coastal village of Kongiganak. She said that the community has inspired her.

Following a flood event in 1966, many members relocated from the village of Kwigillingok to higher ground, a settlement which would become known as Kongiganak. Now, the permafrost under the village is thawing and Kongiganak is facing its own set of climate impacts.

“It really started with the story of my community,” Ropati explained. “And it’s because of that story of survival, I think, that brought me to where I’m at now.”

“Now” for Ropati means working in New York City as an engineer designing public housing infrastructure for Indigenous communities across the country. Ropati has also started her own nonprofit education organization called LilnativegirlinSTEM and was recently named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Ropati said that she was back in Alaska, driving around Anchorage with her mom and her partner, when she got the news that she’d been selected as a youth climate advisor to the United Nations (U.N.)’s secretary general.

“It really meant a lot to be there, especially with my mom where these stories of survival really originated from her and specifically that story of relocation,” Ropati said. “Just our ability as Yup’ik people to do these type of things. Not only for survival, but for the love of each other and community.”

As a youth climate advisor, Ropati will be part of a cohort working with United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to provide “practical and outcome-focused advice, diverse youth perspectives” around climate action, according to a press release from the U.N.

The youth advisor roles are pretty new to the U.N. In 2025, the number of selected advisors doubled from seven to 14. According to the press release, that’s to help support young people who don’t often have a seat at the table. Ropati is one of the first Alaska Native youth to be appointed as an advisor.

“I think this is a huge win, especially for youth in the Arctic,” Ropai said. “Because I don’t think we’ve ever been given this type of platform before.”

It’s a big year to be involved. The United Nations’ annual climate conference will take place this November in Brazil. Also this coming year, countries in the U.N. are required to submit new climate plans.

The plans will follow the Paris Agreement, a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the global surface temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s a figure the U.N. has emphasized as a tipping point for damaging climate impacts, a point Ropati said affects the human rights of Indigenous people in the Arctic.

“We know that if that happens, and if our world does do that, that’s going to have devastating impacts, not only on these nations or states, but it’s going to have devastating impacts on Indigenous peoples, and especially on us, on Yup’ik, on Inuit, on Inupiaq, on all of us in our state,” Ropati said.

Ropati said human rights form the foundation of her climate advocacy. She said that Indigenous people on the front lines of climate change are often left out of the discussion when it comes to climate solutions. But she said they’re a group well-equipped with answers.

“When we talk about the climate work we’ve been doing, this is work that has been carried on through generations,” Ropati said. “This is work that didn’t start with me. It started with my great grandfather, to my grandmother, to my mother, and now me.”

Ropati said that climate conversations in the Western world often involve looking for quick fixes. But in Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta villages facing relocation, Ropati said that it’s understood that climate solutions can take generations. The recent relocation of the village of Newtok to a new site, Mertarvik, was one that was decades of planning and discussions in the making.

“It’s not just up to our youth to do this, and it needs to be intergenerational,” Ropati said. “I think this is something we as Indigenous people have always understood and continue to do, especially in our communities.”

In her capacity as a U.N. youth climate advisor, Ropati will work for the next three years alongside appointees from around the world, including Kenya, Sweden, and Indonesia.

Ropati said that she’s looking forward to bringing Indigenous perspectives to the forefront of the international climate discussions.