KYUK - Bethel

A series of large storms have left some Western Alaska communities grappling with flooding and erosion. Some residents report that the flooding is worse than Typhoon Merbok, and that it rivals this year’s historic breakup floods on the Kuskokwim River.

In Tuntutuliak, on the lower Kuskokwim, a community member reported to the National Weather Service that at least two houses had been inundated with water.

In Napakiak, already-rapid erosion marching toward the community’s school has reportedly come within 6 feet of the gym, creating safety concerns for the building. According to Napakiak resident Bethany Hale, water levels began rising rapidly around 1 p.m. on Aug. 18, but appeared to be receding as of that evening.

Upriver in Akiak, community members have reported riverbank erosion of between 10 and 20 feet due to the storm, along with swamped boats and lost fishing nets.

In Bethel, the city government closed the south boat harbor and East Avenue because of flooding. As of the evening of Aug. 18, the Kuskokwim River gauge at Brown’s Slough recorded a level of 9.52 feet, well into the minor flooding stage.

Earlier that afternoon, Bethel Search and Rescue reported water over the roadway at multiple locations along the Bethel riverfront and wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour.

According to Christian Landry, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage, strong onshore winds have been holding an already swollen Kuskokwim River in place.

“The river wants to pour out and exit into the Bering Sea. It’s having trouble doing that with all of the wave action, and the winds, and all of the new rainfall dropping into the river, so it’s swelling beyond capacity,” Landry said.

The National Weather Service has extended a flood warning for Kuskokwim River communities to include Tuntutuliak and the tundra villages of Kasigluk, Nunapitchuk, and Atmautluak, effective through 6 p.m. on Aug. 19.

A coastal flood advisory for the Kuskokwim Delta was lifted on the evening of Aug. 18. Images posted on social media just hours before showed widespread inundation in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, where one resident said that the flooding was the worst in more than three decades.

The rain, flooding, and erosion have been caused by the second in a series of storms to hit Southwest Alaska in the past week. The first weather system off the Bering Sea began blasting the region on Aug. 15, tapering off before the weekend.

Earlier this week, a National Weather Service meteorologist said that he believed that the impact of the high winds and surf from the second storm were made more severe by the rare super blue moon that will peak on Aug. 19. According to Landry, meteorologists are still unsure what the impacts will look like for a third storm forecast to hit the region, considered to be the remnants of Typhoon Ampil.

“It appears that this system is going to push mostly to the north of the area. It will bring potentially another round of rain by late [Aug. 20] after noon. However, how potent that wave will be is not entirely certain,” Landry said.

The National Weather Service advises all residents to secure belongings, move items inland when possible, and to be alert and prepared to take action.

Visit the Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center website for the latest flood advisory updates, or call the 24-hour toll-free Alaska Weather Information Line at 855-937-4977.

For decades, The Tundra Drums newspaper served as a mouthpiece for the issues that mattered most to communities in Western Alaska. Now, a website posing as the former Bethel institution is stealing media content from across the state. But why it’s happening is a mystery.

Earlier this summer, KYUK got a call. Was the shuttered Tundra Drums, once a trusted news source for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, resuming publication?

The caller was referring to thetundradrums.com website, which had been all but defunct for almost a decade. Over the past two months, though, the website has been prolific in its coverage of Alaska issues. One author, Hadiqah Shahid, has managed to stay on top of breaking news from Anchorage and across the state, all while offering up a rich variety of Bethel stories — using copy and imagery taken from KYUK stories posted just days earlier, among other sources. Shahid has also covered stories from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, Ohio’s Bethel Township, and a Bethel College in Kansas.

Kenrick Mock, a computer science professor and founder of the University of Alaska’s Data Science and AI Lab, said that The Tundra Drums website bears the hallmarks of artificial intelligence.

“The website very strongly looks like it was generated by AI. It has a pretty broad range of stories, some of the common keywords, like Bethel, where it’s pulling in other stories about other places that have Bethel in the name,” Mock said. “Just the fact that a website of this scope could be set up in a small town like Bethel is also a little puzzling.”

Frequent contributor Shahid has no author biography or profile photo, and like other names that appear atop stories on The Tundra Drums website, does not appear to be a real person. Nearly all of Shahid’s news stories appear to be rewritten versions of coverage already online, though multiple short public safety stories, like one about a water outage in Bethel, were apparently written based on social media posts alone. Mock said that the content in the stories themselves also contains tell-tale signs of AI writing.

“(There are) lots of bullet points, (and) not going into kind of specific details or quotes. And so if we’re doing a summary, for example, of another story, they look kind of like this,” Mock said.

Online content farms

There are numerous active online content farms reportedly using AI to rewrite news stories from major publications. On the revamped The Tundra Drums website, articles are presented as original content and do not link back to original stories. Multiple stories contain photos republished without permission or attribution, and a line at the bottom of the website reads “All Copyright Reversed.”

However, the website is conspicuously free of ads. This surprises Mock.

“So of course I first thought when I heard about this was, ‘oh they’ve got some ad banner up there so they can make some revenue by people coming to the site,’ but there doesn’t appear to be any of that,” Mock said. “And obviously, it would cost them money to run the site.”

Some of that cost comes with hosting the site, and in mid-July, whatever privately registered entity is paying for the domain renewed their membership for another year.

“They kept that private by registering through a proxy. So it’s not clear who has actually registered this website,” Mock said.

To the undiscerning eye, thetundradrums.com is a legitimate news site – sleek, straightforward, and a one-stop shop for local, state, and world news.

If there were any question of whether the website is really claiming to be the authentic The Tundra Drums, its Facebook page bills it as “Alaska’s trusted news source since 1974,” the year the former Bethel newspaper was founded.

The current owner of The Tundra Drums newspaper, Edgar Blatchford, did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the website.

According to an Internet archival tool called the Wayback Machine, The Tundra Drums website has fallen into varying states of disrepair since 2016 when it, alongside the print edition, ceased publishing news.

But on May 10, the new incarnation of the website published what appears to be its first story, a summary of infrastructure projects in Bethel by an author named Rebecca Sean. It features an unattributed photo of an Anchorage intersection snapped by an Anchorage Daily News photographer.

On July 22, another unattributed ADN photo accompanied a story about former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson. But this time, The Tundra Drums story also appeared on a massive news aggregator called NewsBreak that does host ads.

NewsBreak pays contributors based on page views, and itself has previously been accused of publishing lifted local news content under fictitious bylines.

Mock, with the AI lab, said that the real endgame of The Tundra Drums website could go beyond simply being listed on profit-driven aggregators like NewsBreak.

“The other thought is it could be basically a test to see what someone can do,” Mock said. “So let’s pick a small place, they’ll mostly go unnoticed, right? But we can try these technologies out, and test them and see what happens, and hone the software for whatever future purpose someone might have.”

As the “About Us” tab on the website explains, “In a world where misinformation is rampant, we believe in the power of responsible journalism to empower individuals and shape society.”

The question of why the namesake of a long-vanished Bethel newspaper has become involved in this mission remains unanswered.

The Tundra Drums did not respond to a request for comment through its website, or through its domain hosting service.

Aniak’s tribal government is suing state and federal agencies for allegedly taking human remains from a burial site discovered beneath the local airport — and not returning them.

The Aniak Traditional Council, the federally recognized tribe for the Kuskokwim River community about 90 miles northeast of Bethel, says the actions of the federal and state agencies are a violation of federal law. Its suit, filed in U.S. District Court, claims they have barred the tribe from practicing its cultural and religious traditions, and have endangered other ancestral remains of Aniak’s tribe that could still be at the community’s airport.

The suit names five defendants: the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities and DOTPF Commissioner Ryan Anderson; the Federal Aviation Administration and FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker; and the University of Alaska system.

The Traditional Council is represented by Anchorage-based law firm Fortier & Mikko, P.C.

The tribe wants the excavated remains to be returned. It also seeks permission to continue exploring the site to recover and preserve other remains or cultural artifacts.

According to the complaint, filed Tuesday, the suit stems from a project to relocate Aniak’s airport runway to comply with federal aviation standards.

In 2020, a contractor digging trenches for the project found human remains. Almost a year later, the Traditional Council brought in an archaeologist to examine the site. The suit says the archaeologist discovered that the airport project cut a trench through a “previously intact prehistoric burial site.”

The recovered remains and related artifacts were sent to the University of Alaska for examination.

Since then, the Traditional Council says that the University of Alaska has kept the remains. It also claims that the FAA has refused to assist in repatriating them, a violation of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The Traditional Council also claims that the FAA and DOTPF have barred the tribe from conducting further excavation. Aniak’s tribal government is concerned that airport maintenance could further disturb the site.

An FAA spokesperson said Wednesday that the agency does not comment on litigation.

As the 2024 Yukon River salmon season kicks off, there will once again be little to no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any actual salmon.

One small exception is summer chum. If the run hits half a million fish, residents of the lower reaches of the Yukon may have the chance to take to the river with dipnets and other non-traditional gear for a brief window like they did in 2023.

But as Holly Carroll, the Yukon River subsistence fishery manager for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted in April, these types of opportunities may not be worth the effort for many along the river.

“Who’s going to spend nine bucks a gallon to go out fishing with a dipnet?” Carroll asked. “It might take them four or five hours to get seven chums. Whereas if they had been given their six-inch gillnet, they put it out for a minute, minute and a half, and they’re done. They’ll have 100. Then they’ll spend the next couple of days cutting and smoking, and they’re done for the season.”

While communities cannot count on these types of heavily restricted opportunities to meet their subsistence needs in 2024, one thing they can count on is a total closure of chinook salmon fishing for the next seven years. Carroll said that the recently signed Alaska-Canada agreement was overdue.

“For me as the federal manager, I see this as the bold step that needed to be taken. We’re just not seeing the returns off those runs that we would have liked. I really felt that it was time,” Carroll said. “I also think we really needed to listen to our tribal stakeholders who have been telling us for years that this annual approach is not a great way to manage.”

The seven-year agreement calls for rebuilding chinook stocks to the point that at least 71,000 of the fish cross into Canada each year. It is technically not a moratorium, as meeting this number at any point in the next seven years would in theory lift the closure. But in 2024, fewer than 15,000 fish are expected to complete the journey.

Many believe that trawler bycatch plays an outsized role in keeping chinook and chum from returning to the Yukon River. But Carroll said that the fish are up against a lot in terms of a changing environment.

“I think they’re dealing with a lot more climate changes, certainly warming oceans, different food sources, the food is moving to different areas,” Carroll said. “We’ve seen less healthy fish. Their gas tanks are less full when they go to make that migration. We’re seeing heat stress, we’re seeing warm temperatures when they come into the river.”

Since 2019, Carroll said that chinook numbers recorded on the upper Yukon River at Eagle have fallen drastically below corresponding numbers far downriver at Pilot Station. Biologists believe one thing that may be killing them off somewhere along that nearly 1,100-mile journey is the disease-causing Ichthyophonus parasite.

According to a 2022 report by federal and state biologists to the Alaska Board of Fish, the severity of Ichthyophonus infections has been found to peak somewhere near the midway point of the river in Alaska. But going further upriver, severely infected fish were rarely found, the report said.

Carroll said that scientists are also researching chinook salmon eggs to try and identify potential threats to future stocks. They want to know whether low levels of the vitamin thiamine that have been linked to early salmon mortality are further impacting the fish.

In 2024, the clock is ticking as scientists try to understand what is happening to Yukon River salmon. But as Carroll acknowledged, the clock is also ticking when it comes to communities along the river simply being able to feed themselves.

“How can we get people more food? And if it is with selective gear, how do we get people using them? Because they’re not traditional, they’re not easy, they’re not efficient,” Carroll said. “We all need to get to the table and figure out how to get people some food while still protecting the chinook while we rebuild them.”

The first chinook of the season are likely entering the lower Yukon River at this moment. With luck, they’ll make it to their natal streams, protected by the efforts of communities with whom they are inextricably connected.

When special education teacher Dale Ebcas moved from his home in the Philippines to the tiny Alaskan village of Upper Kalskag back in the winter of 2020, the warmest layer he brought with him was a trench coat.

“I was imagining a weather like, you know, Korea,” Ebcas laughed. “Because I’m a fan of watching Korean movies and it’s like, ‘oh, they’re just wearing trench coats. It seems like it might work.’”

The average temperature in the Philippines’ coldest month is just about 78 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast, the climate in Upper Kalskag is semi-arctic and snow can blanket the ground for more than half the year. Needless to say, the trench coat didn’t cut it. Ebcas had to borrow a down jacket from the principal of the school where he’d been hired.

His school district, the Kuspuk School District in Western Alaska, is about the same size as the state of Maryland. While the region is large, the student population is small: only 318 kids spread out across seven villages and none of those villages connected by a road system. Here, like in many other rural school districts across America, it’s a struggle to fill nearly 40 teaching positions. That’s why the Kuspuk School District is bringing in educators like Ebcas from over 5,000 miles away. So many of them, in fact, that they now make up more than half the district’s teaching staff. It’s one of many school districts around the country who are addressing a shortage of teachers by relying on special visas that allow foreign teachers to come work in the United States.

Ebcas is from Cagayan de Oro City on the Philippine island of Mindanao, an island with a population of more than 26 million people. By contrast, there are just over 200 people in Upper Kalskag. While winters are long and the community is tiny, Ebcas has seen a lot of success. Earlier this year, the Governor’s Council on Disabilities and Special Education in Alaska honored Ebcas with an Individual of the Year Award for Special Education in Inclusive Practices. Earlier this month, he was also recognized as one of among 20 teachers for Alaska’s 2024 Educators of the Year.

“I truly believe that that award only signifies that as a school district, we are doing our best to help the kids here in the village. That we are really striving hard to promote inclusion and understanding with kids, with disability and without disability,” Ebcas said.

Ebcas said that he enjoyed teaching in Alaska so much that he encouraged other teachers he knew from the Philippines to join him. His aunt, Vanissa Carbon, now teaches second grade in Upper Kalskag. Although she said that the winter in Upper Kalskag is long, she’s been pleasantly surprised by life here, where the population is predominantly Indigenous. “The people here are also like Filipinos. Their culture is somehow the same in terms of close family ties, being together on occasions and helping each other,” said Carbon.

In the Kuspuk School district, teachers who come from the Philippines say that they can make 15 times the amount of money they could at home, in addition to benefits. And they have access to teaching tools and technologies that aren’t as readily available in the Philippines.

“I was quite fascinated with the fact that we have resources that are really readily accessible to students with special needs,” Ebcas said. He pointed to tools like a “talking pen,” which assists students in learning to read, among other technologies. “These kinds of devices, we don’t have them in the Philippines. It’s very expensive,” he said.

The teachers who come to the U.S. from the Philippines are highly qualified, said Madeline Aguillard, superintendent of the Kuspuk School District. “These were very highly educated individuals, oftentimes with multiple masters degrees or even an earned doctorate, even after we do a foreign credential evaluation,” she said.

Aguillard did her PhD research on the special education system in the Philippines. She said that the requirements for students working toward teaching degrees there aren’t so different from what’s required in the U.S. “Their studies were purely 100% based on the U.S. model of students receiving special education services,” Aguillard said. She said that her research was in the back of her mind when her school district opted to pursue hiring foreign teachers.

Both Ebcas and Carbon are here on J-1 visitor visas, which are good for three years and can be extended for two more. The J-1 is a cultural exchange visa for visitors, and J-1 visa holders often fill summer service positions related to the travel industry in Alaska. Childcare workers, including au pairs, also use J-1 visas. Nationwide, there are more than 5,700 teachers in the U.S. on J-1 visas. Ninty-one of them are in Alaska.

“They do have program requirements where they do have to share not only their culture, but also learn about the culture that they are immersed in for their job,” said Aguillard. “A big part of education in rural Alaska specifically is the emphasis on cultural heritage and keeping that culture alive, whether it be Alaska Native culture, or whatever culture an individual brings with them to the space they’re in,” she said.

Aguillard said that the teachers host Filipino-themed events in her school district. “A couple of our teachers have put on informative nights about the Philippines, so they’ll decorate the whole gym, they’ll cook food and do a lecture on Filipino cultural traditions,” she said.

Aguillard said that J-1 visas have had a dramatic positive impact in her school district. “We went from having zero applicants for positions for a year-long posting to over 100 applicants of extremely qualified people with experience, and they’re wanting to come teach our students,” she said.

Still, Aguillard said that the teacher shortage in the Kuspuk School District is so dire that 20% of teaching positions were never filled this year, even with the teachers on J-1 visas. Now the Kuspuk School District is looking at ways to keep foreign teachers on staff for more than five years. One option is the H-1B visa, a specialty occupation visa that paves the way for immigration.

Kuspuk isn’t the only remote school district in Alaska utilizing U.S. State Department visas to fill teaching positions. More than 350 miles south, the Kodiak Island School District has hired an immigration lawyer to secure H-1B visas, and they’re also recruiting teachers in the Philippines.

At an Alaska Senate Finance Committee hearing in March, Kodiak Island School District Superintendent Cyndi Mika said that the district now hosts its own job fair in the Phillipines. “This year we went to both Manila and Cebu City,” she said. “We went to Cebu [City] because it’s rural-remote, and we knew that those are the types of teachers that would be better integrated into our community.”

In Upper Kalskag, Ebcas extended his J-1 Visa for two additional years, but at the end of the next school year his time in Alaska will run out as well. He said that it’s a disappointing reality of the J-1 visa program that he can’t stay on to build on the work he’s already done.

“I could have continued the things I do with the community and the kids if only I could go beyond five years,” Ebcas said. “I consider this already as my family, the community here, the kids here.”

Breakup has wrapped up on the Kuskokwim River, a week after a series of massive ice floes began wreaking havoc on multiple lower-river communities. Now, individuals affected by flooding have the opportunity to apply for disaster relief funding.

Early this week, the RiverWatch team flew far downriver from Bethel in search of the breakup front. But National Weather Service hydrometeorologist Kyle Van Peursem said that they found that it had basically disappeared.

“There’s usually just a lot of chunk ice pushing up against that strong ice, and that’s what we call the breakup front. There was no chunk ice there. It went from open water to spotty, in-place, rotten ice,” Van Peursem said. “We really have about 30 miles of intact ice left on the Kuskokwim, and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna jam. It’s just melting in place.”

While the breakup front is gone, flooding in some areas is slower to disappear. Due to a combination of multiple ice jams and high meltwater, Kwethluk saw some of the worst of this year’s breakup flooding.

“We were kind of scratching our heads because everyone else around them was receding pretty fast and not even flooding anymore. But Kwethluk still had pretty significant impacts with high water,” Van Peursem said.

As of Monday, low-lying areas remained heavily inundated, though Van Peursem said that the water was down roughly a foot and a half from its peak days earlier.

“The tundra up there is just completely saturated still in spots. You can’t even see where the river is because it’s just completely full of water,” Van Peursem said.

On Sunday, Vanessa Epchook, a spokesperson for the City of Kwethluk, said that the community was still in the process of getting piped water back and running following damage to a water pump early on in the flooding. She also said that the city was waiting to assess potential damage to the foundations of homes subjected to multiple days of standing water.

“All of these homes, they’re probably going to experience some unleveling because of the saturation,” Epchook said. “Some of these houses, their foundation is already bad from last year.”

Downriver in Bethel, water levels were down more than three feet from their Friday peak as of Monday. One resident of the heavily affected Alligator Acres neighborhood took to social media to proclaim: “Land ho.” Others thanked the City of Bethel for making Sunday water deliveries to homes that had been cut off for days by floodwaters.

As of Monday, residents of communities downriver of Bethel were no longer grappling with high water, but some, like Napaskiak resident Earl Samuelson, were tallying up the damage.

“Did a little assessment through town this morning, a lot of boardwalk damage: uneven, some washed out, some boards gone,” Samuelson said. “One home I could see the insulation was starting to fall down. And I also noticed a lot of erosion where the river came up so fast and formed its own channel.”

As of Monday, residents of communities downriver of Bethel were no longer grappling with high water, but some, like Napaskiak resident Earl Samuelson, were tallying up the damage.

“Did a little assessment through town this morning, a lot of boardwalk damage: uneven, some washed out, some boards gone,” Samuelson said. “One home I could see the insulation was starting to fall down. And I also noticed a lot of erosion where the river came up so fast and formed its own channel.”