Southwest

Susan Sookram sat in the hot tub of the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Fitness Center. She brought her book to settle into — an anthology containing the first three Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books — with the whole tub to herself.

But up until recently, this post-workout ritual was put on pause.

“I think I did come a little bit less without that motivating thought of taking a relaxing dip afterwards,” Sookram said.

Since July, the hot tub in Bethel’s fitness center had been out of commission. There was an issue with its pump. And, like with any beloved relative – people have been calling, sending Facebook messages, and stopping by in person for months to ask if it was getting better.

Bethel Parks and Recreation Department staff said that they even got a request from a community member to publicly share the tracking information on the missing part so that everyone could keep tabs on it. Then, after four months, it was finally fixed.

“It was sort of to very quiet fanfare, and I felt like it deserved more of a community-wide announcement and/or celebration,” Sookram said.

David Chakuchin, the facilities manager at the fitness center, said that he didn’t know the hot tub outage would be that big of a deal.

“It was kind of surprising how people would be, like, getting upset,” Chakuchin said. “Like, chill. It’s just a hot tub.”

In the months since the hot tub has been down, the rumors have flown around town about what had gone wrong. KYUK Multimedia Department’s MaryCait Dolan asked Chakuchin about some of them during our interview.

“Wasn’t it also, like, once the part came in, there had to be someone to, like, crawl into the inner workings of the hot tub too?” Dolan asked. “I don’t know where I heard that.”

Chakuchin smiled.

“No, no one had to crawl,” Chakuchin said, laughing.

In actuality, what happened is a classic tale in rural Alaska. The broken part first had to be identified and its nearly $10,000 price tag paid for. Then it had to be shipped to Bethel from the lower 48, which takes much longer than normal shipping times. And then there were bigger problems to solve.

“Typhoon Halong hit, and then that, like, just delayed it another, like, two or three weeks, maybe,” Chakuchin said.

This is the first time in the pool’s 11 year history that it has needed major maintenance.

“In the future, I don’t think it’s going to be that hard because we kind of learned a lot of lessons,” Chakuchin said.

Chakuchin said that it was surprising to hear how much people cared about the hot tub.

Mac Nowicki is a hot tub regular and admitted that he fell into the party of pushier hot tub inquirers.

“I did for, I don’t know, like two months, [a] pilgrimage asking,” Nowicki said. “They displayed little piece of paper which says ‘it’s on the way’. Then they display another piece of paper which says ‘we should fix it,’ and then — finally.”

Now on the other side, Nowicki said that it’s been nice to have the space for his muscles and spine to relax. He likes to come at least twice a week.

Now that it’s back open, the hot tub and greater fitness center have been busy. After Typhoon Halong displaced many residents of coastal communities to Bethel, the fitness center is offering its showers and facilities, including the hot tub, to evacuees.

Chakuchin said that there are a lot of people using the facilities. Bethel is the only community in the Y-K Delta to have a pool and hot tub. Bethel Life Savers also sponsors free snacks and drinks for impacted families.

“There’s a lot, a lot of families come in, and it’s, it’s nice, nice to see it’s more busy for us, but it is nice that they do have a place to come in,” Chakuchin said.

On Friday and Monday nights, community members gather in the hot tub before starting a pickup game of water polo.

“If we’re one or two people shy of two teams, we have recruited people that never played before from just chilling in the hot tub,” Scott said.

That’s water polo regular Sundi Scott. Scott said that the moments before jumping in the pool to play are particularly important.

“It gives us time to socialize before we get really competitive with each other,” Scott said.

Scott said that during the hot tub’s outage, participation numbers suffered. But now there have been enough people for two teams and time to laugh and relax against the jets.

For water polo regular and KYUK’s outgoing news director Sage Smiley, it’s her last night in town before moving away.

“I wanted to spend my last night with the community,” Smiley said. “And the way you do that on a Friday night in Bethel, at least for me, is by playing water polo and sitting in the hot tub.”

The fitness center’s Equitable Access Program offers assistance to make memberships accessible for all families interested. For more information, visit the Y-K Fitness Center’s website.

Pickup water polo is held on Monday and Friday evenings, beginning in the hot tub at 7:00 p.m. before playing between 7:15 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Developers’ efforts to overturn the cancellation of a vast gold and copper mine planned for southwest Alaska are getting a boost from national mining and pro-business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

On Nov. 24 and Nov. 25, the Chamber and the National Mining Association filed separate friend-of-the-court briefs in the lawsuit brought by the developers of the proposed Pebble Mine against the Environmental Protection Agency, which vetoed the mine.

Neither group has intervened in the case against the EPA, but the briefs represent the groups’ support for the proposed mine and offer legal arguments that Judge Sharon Gleason could consider as she debates whether to move the project forward.

In 2023, the EPA invoked a rarely used “veto” clause of the Clean Water Act to say that there was no way that the proposed Pebble Mine could be developed without significant harm to the environment. The large mineral deposit is located at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, the most abundant sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

The administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, which supports the project, and the proposed mine’s developers, filed separate lawsuits in federal court to overturn the rejection, as did two Native corporations that work as contractors for the developers. Those cases have since been combined.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case directly, which has left the issue in front of Judge Sharon Gleason in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska.

Another lawsuit filed by the state claims that if the veto is upheld, the federal government will owe Alaska $700 billion, the state’s estimate for the value of the mine if built as planned. That case has been put on hold until the District Court rules.

In July, the administration of President Donald Trump indicated that it might try to settle the suit and withdraw the veto. If that occurs, it could come before Jan. 2, when the EPA is slated to file a written response to the plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment.

If the EPA continues to fight the case, the last written arguments are scheduled to be finished by the end of February. Any oral argument would take place afterward.

If the federal government drops the case, it doesn’t mean a free path for Pebble: Several environmental organizations, fishing groups, tribal organizations and Bristol Bay locals have also intervened in the case and intend to fight in court.

The Alaska Legislature is also expected to consider a bill that would block both Pebble and any successor projects that might emerge.

In its brief, the National Mining Association — joined by the American Exploration and Mining Association and the Alaska Miners Association — call the EPA’s veto “overly broad” and say that if it is upheld, the act “will almost certainly chill investment in domestic mining activities” because other proposed mines could also be subject to a veto.

The Chamber of Commerce, which has backed the Pebble Mine project since at least 2022, said that if the veto is upheld, it has the potential of encouraging other vetoes, which would “disrupt important industries in which many of the Chamber’s members participate.”

For more than a decade, the Kuspuk School District asked Alaska’s education department for the money to fix a rotting elementary school. The school, in the small and predominantly Indigenous community of Aniak in western Alaska, was in deep need of repairs. The nearby Kuskokwim River had flooded the 88-year-old building several times. The walls were moldy. Sewage was leaking into a space below the school’s kitchen.

In 2018, the department finally approved the school district’s $18.6 million funding request to build a new elementary school wing onto Aniak’s middle and high school building, which was owned by the state.

But on Page 4 of the funding contract for the project, Alaska’s education department included a catch.

“The State would only build the new school if the local school board agreed to own it when completed,” former superintendent James Anderson said in an email to KYUK Public Media, NPR and ProPublica.

In the end, Anderson agreed. He worried that if he didn’t, it would jeopardize kids’ health and safety. But he said he also worried about the financial and legal implications of the agreement for the school district, where nearly 30% of families live in poverty. If the state owned the building, it would be responsible for repairs and liability. Anderson worried that if the district took ownership of the school, it might be on the hook.

According to a review of deeds and project funding agreements, Alaska’s education department has transferred ownership of 54 buildings to rural public school districts since 2003. That’s nearly four times as many compared with the two decades prior. That same year, a new clause appeared in the funding agreements that districts sign with the state: In return for the money to make repairs to run-down schools or to build new ones, school districts would have to agree to own the buildings.

Alaska education department spokesperson Bryan Zadalis said in an email that the department didn’t have documentation about why the contract language changed. He wrote that “the main clauses of the project agreement are boilerplate language” and were last reviewed by Alaska’s Department of Law in 2019.

Seven current or former superintendents representing rural school districts with student populations that are predominantly Alaska Native said it’s unclear whether a change of ownership also changes a school district’s responsibility to maintain its facilities. The districts can’t use tax revenue to pay for education because the communities they serve are unincorporated. As a result, the state is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance in many rural school districts, but it often takes years to secure that money. Because the funds are hard to come by, superintendents have also said they feel pressure to sign the contracts.

“We’re all sort of trying to find the best, most optimal use of very lean resources,” said Hannibal Anderson, superintendent of the Lower Kuskokwim School District, Alaska’s largest rural district, covering an area nearly the size of West Virginia. “There’s very little room for negotiation.”

Last summer, after nearly two decades, two more Kuspuk district schools, upriver from Aniak, received funding from the state to remedy severe structural problems and serious health and safety risks that the district has reported to the state’s education department for years. In both cases, the money wasn’t enough to fix everything, but superintendent Madeline Aguillard said it was better than nothing, so she signed contracts that also required the district to own those schools.

“What choice did I have?” she asked.

Over the last year, KYUK, NPR and ProPublica have documented a health and safety crisis inside many rural school buildings across Alaska. Water lines and sewer systems are backing up. Roofs are leaking and foundations are crumbling. Until this summer, at least one school was in danger of collapse. The state has largely ignored hundreds of requests from rural school districts to fix deteriorating buildings. Some of the worst conditions exist at state-owned schools.

Losing Sleep Over Liability

Unlike most other U.S. states, where schools are owned locally, Alaska’s education department owns nearly half of the 128 rural schools open in the state today. In most cases, school districts own the remainder.

In an interview, education department staff said shifting ownership from the state to districts cuts red tape and gives districts more local control over how the building is maintained and used.

“We’re very much a hands-off landlord, as it were,” said Lori Weed, the education department’s school finance manager. “So the hope was that districts would take title to sites so that they could have the control, because we’ve been so hands off.”

There are several overlapping Alaska laws governing school ownership. Collectively, they allow school districts to take over supervision of school construction or maintenance projects and to initiate a transfer of ownership. None of those laws require schools to accept ownership; one says a school board “may” take that action.

However, in some cases, the education department’s contracts say that school boards “shall” take over ownership in order to receive funding.

Howard Trickey, an attorney who has spent most of his career representing public schools in Alaska, said the state could be misinterpreting the law. “‘May’ means you don’t have to do something,” he said. “So to interpret that statute to say it’s mandatory is overreaching.”

The contract for Aniak’s elementary school project says the district “agrees to comply” with several conditions and “shall request title interest of the new facility.” According to the education department, districts are permitted to request the removal of this provision, and it doesn’t require the transfer in order for a district to receive project funding.

Aguillard said she’s still trying to negotiate with the state. Records show Alaska’s education department still owns the facilities used for education in Aniak.

Trickey also believes that such ownership changes could create huge risks for rural school districts in Alaska.

“Suppose a facility was in such disrepair and had such life safety issues as inadequate electrical system, and the school catches on fire and burns down and children are injured,” Trickey said. “If the state owned it, the state would be liable for those injuries.”

A staff member with the education department said there hasn’t been a recent case where someone got hurt. “I would argue that if something happens, it’s going to become a legal battle,” said Heather Heineken, the department’s director of finance and support services, who previously was finance director for a district in Alaska’s Interior.

Rod Morrison, superintendent of the Southeast Island School District, said he loses sleep over liability in his schools, which suffer from leaking roofs, black mold and, at one school, a nonfunctional fire suppression system. The state transferred ownership of that school, in Thorne Bay, to the district in 1998.

In August, Morrison asked the state to allow him to use $300,000 left over from a state-funded project at another school in his district to address the fire suppression system. In September, Michael Butikofer, facilities manager for Alaska’s education department, denied the request, saying it may not be legal. He encouraged Morrison to submit a new application for the funds to fix the suppression system instead.

“When they denied the transfer of the funds or refused to fix my fire suppression system, then I requested the state to take liability of that facility,” Morrison said. “Then of course they said no, they’re not going to take liability for that.”

In a response letter, Butikofer told Morrison that the “ultimate responsibility for day-to-day safety and facility operations lies with the district.”

The district has made 17 funding requests to the state since 2009 for the money to replace the system. During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in Juneau this spring, Morrison presented lawmakers with a giant light bulb, blackened by a short in the electrical wiring in the school’s gymnasium ceiling. Morrison said it’s not a matter of if, but when, a fire might consume the building.

Decades of Contamination

Alaska inherited dozens of schools from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the three decades after it gained statehood in 1959. During those decades, state officials complained about being burdened with schools that were already in bad shape.

Those schools also came with other liability risks. Some buildings stand on land previously used by the military, where highly toxic and volatile chemicals have been found. And leaking fuel tanks have contaminated the property at dozens of rural schools, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

That was the case with a BIA school in the Bering Sea community of Toksook Bay, which the state acquired in 1990. There, a corroded pipe leaked 5,000 gallons of fuel into the crawl space of a maintenance building associated with the elementary school. The city of Toksook Bay sued both the school district and the state, arguing that the leak contaminated the city’s water system, damaged land and caused illness. The state Legislature approved over a million dollars in settlement funds for the city.

In response, the Legislature passed a law in 1997 that limited the state and rural school districts’ liability for chemical spills on their land. However, the law does not absolve the state or districts from paying for cleanups, which can cost millions.

Bill O’Connell, who manages contaminated site cleanup for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said paying for cleanups is harder in rural districts. In municipal school districts, local taxes can help cover the cost. But rural districts rely on the state for nearly all of their funding.

“The money that the school districts get is just to educate the students,” O’Connell said. “There’s no consideration of contaminated site cleanup. It’s really just kind of an unmet need.”

He pointed to an old building in Aniak that served the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War as particularly concerning. He said the legacy of highly toxic contaminants started before the building was used for education. The state-owned building, once used by the school district for vocational training, has been demolished, but its foundation stands about 200 yards from the school where kids still take classes everyday. O’Connell said cleanup at the site was officially completed this year, but there are still contaminants below the surface and it is unlikely any new construction will ever be allowed there.

In 1997, the same year the liability law passed in Alaska, a group of parents sued the state over conditions inside rural public schools where their kids spent their days. When the case was settled in 2011, the judge’s consent decree called on the state to pay for five new schools. At the time, the state owned four of those buildings. The state paid to build the schools but required each of the districts to accept a transfer of ownership.

Ken Truitt, an attorney who represented the education department in 2003, when the ownership requirement appeared in construction and maintenance funding agreements, said he does not recall being consulted on the contracts or the addition of that language.

Tim Mearig, a former facilities maintenance director for the education department, said that in the early 2000s, leadership believed “it was of no benefit to the state to hold title, and it was a significant benefit to districts to manage their own property.”

Mearig said a change of ownership was eventually “baked in” to project agreements.

Some ownership and liability questions come down to what the state’s constitution requires. Alaska’s education commissioner, Deena Bishop, said the constitution is intended to give local communities maximum control and that the department is following the law. But Trickey, the longtime attorney for Alaska school districts, said the transfers “don’t relieve the state of that ongoing, continuing constitutional duty.”

“The constitution says the state has a duty to establish and maintain a system of public schools open to the children of the state,” he said. “And that just fundamentally and basically starts with adequate schools.”

This story is a collaboration from NPR’s Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism, member station KYUK, and 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.

KWIGILLINGOK, Alaska – When the remnants of Typhoon Halong hit this Alaska Native village last month, Ryan David was at home with his four children. They felt the house shake in the wind, then as floodwaters came, the building floated away.

“I yelled at my kids to get up and group up here, on the stairs, just in case we tip over,” David said when he talked with public broadcaster KYUK. He and his children were still trapped inside. David says the home stopped floating when it hit a bridge. He talked with a KYUK reporter as he waited for rescuers to arrive.

A month later, as villages across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta clean up from the storm and make repairs, hundreds of residents remain evacuated to cities such as Anchorage and Bethel. Now they face another loss. One of the few sources of local news and native language programming — public radio and television station KYUK — has lost federal funding that was up to 70% of its budget and plans to make cuts in January.

The station plans to severely cut staff and some programming as it tries to raise money to fill the budget gap.

The broader public media landscape is also experiencing a loss of federal funding, including at least some money for improving emergency alert systems, as human-caused climate change from burning fossil fuels is heating the planet and increasing risks from extreme weather.

In remote villages KYUK is “crucial”

KYUK broadcasts out of a small tan building at the base of a tall tower in Bethel, Alaska — about 400 miles west of Anchorage. Bethel is a hub community for 56 tribes spread across 48 communities. The station says its coverage area is about the size of Louisiana.

KYUK has been on the air since 1971 and “is a Native American initiated public broadcasting joint licensee” — that means it has both a public radio and television stations. It also has a digital news website and serves a predominantly Yup’ik population of less than 30,000 people in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Many residents, especially elders, primarily speak the Yup’ik language Yugtun.

“It’s very crucial to have that KYUK network,” says Darrel John, a lifelong resident of Kwigillingok. He says the news in Yugtun is especially valuable. “A lot of great advice we listen to from the elders… Any updates from any other communities — you know what to look out for — and the upcoming events.”

Each weekday, as Morning Edition ends, there’s local news and the weather forecast in Yugtun.

“Weather is definitely one of the things that KYUK focuses on because it’s life or death,” says Sage Smiley, KYUK news director. In a place where there are few roads, residents sometimes drive on frozen rivers and need to know where it’s safe to do that. “Getting from community to community in a boat, on a snow machine, in a bush plane, the weather matters almost more than anything else,” Smiley says.

When it became clear the remnants of Typhoon Halong were headed toward the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Smiley says reporters started including that in their reports to warn residents. She says fall storms and even flooding are common in the region, but Halong was different from most.

“This storm took a track that was unexpected, hit south of where it was expected to and in an area that was less prepared for the storm to hit,” Smiley says. “I think all of those factors went into what made it so devastating.”

Three people in Kwigillingok died because of the storm. Nearly every building in the village was damaged. Overall more than 1,600 people were displaced, many of them evacuated in helicopters.

Smiley also coaches the high school swim team and was at a meet in another city when the storm arrived.

“I was working remotely from a minivan with the swim team while the rest of the [news] team was working on the ground here,” Smiley says in the news department studio in Bethel. “And we had collaborators in Anchorage who were helping draft scripts and call communities to figure out what was happening.”

That’s part of being a news director at a small station, but soon KYUK will try to report the news with a third less staff, because in January Smiley’s position will be among those cut.

KYUK loses funding and makes cuts

KYUK was already navigating a loss in funding from the state of Alaska when President Trump targeted public media and Congress eliminated funding this summer. It was a big hit to the station’s finances because federal funding has been up the bulk of its budget.

The federal money essentially paid for employee salaries and benefits.

“It’s a little over $1 million that we’re receiving each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our salaries and benefits in FY 25 [fiscal year 2025] was also a little over $1 million,” says Kristin Hall, KYUK’s general manager.

The station had 10 full- time employees and 13 part-time or on-call workers, says Hall. “Beginning in January, KYUK will transition to four full-time employees and ten part-time and on-call employees.”

In deciding where to make programming cuts, Hall says preserving Yup’ik language programs was a priority. A daily interview program, Coffee at KYUK, will lose three episodes a week in English, but keep its weekly Yugtun episode.

The station’s technical director’s hours will be cut from 40 to 10 hours a week, something Hall says she’s particularly concerned about because that person trouble shoots engineering problems and helps the station manage power outages.

To bring in more revenue, Hall says the station is applying for grants, trying to sell more underwriting announcements and will hold two pledge drives each year instead of just one. The station also expects to receive one-time funding through a Trump administration promise to provide $9.4 million for tribal broadcasting.

Hall says the station will re-evaluate in March 2026 whether the workload is sustainable for the smaller staff. So, more cuts could still come.

“My employment here was hanging on by a hair,” says Sam Berlin, a long-time host of the Yugtun language talk show Yuk to Yuk. “But the people, God bless them, they got together and we raised over $100,000 with our fundraiser.”

Just before Typhoon Halong hit the region, KYUK raised the money during its fall fundraiser. “It was our most successful we have ever seen in the history of KYUK,” Hall says. That helps, but doesn’t fill the funding gap.

Raising money in a region with fewer than 30,000 people and with a poverty rate that’s twice the national average is difficult. Hall says many people live a subsistence lifestyle, which means they may not have money to give.

“The encouragement that we get from local folks aren’t always in dollars,” Hall says. She says one person baked blueberry muffins to support the fundraiser and someone else dropped off salmon strips. Hall says an elder came to the station, and in an act of generosity, poured out her purse on the break room table. “And everything that fell out was less than $3. And she said, ‘I want you to have it.’ And it was literally everything in her purse.”

Hall says the station hopes its funding strategy will be enough to support the smaller team after January. If KYUK doesn’t exist, there’s no one else doing the station’s level of journalism in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. “In terms of local news and information, and especially local news and information in Yup’ik, No, there is no one else,” Hall says.

Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Climate Correspondent Jeff Brady. It was edited by Managing Editors Vickie Walton-James and Gerald Holmes. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Just off Main Street in Haines, a large field sits in the shadow of Mount Ripinski.

For a few years, the land sat empty. Local Liz Landes would look at it and think: “Why isn’t that full of food?”

Now it is. Or at least, it was in September, during a tour of the property at the tail end of the harvest season.

After pulling on her rubber rain gear in the high tunnel, Landes walked into a downpour and weaved through rows of kale, herbs, pumpkins and sunflowers. She pointed out black and red currants, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, asparagus and fava beans she said were “desperately ready to harvest.”

“We’ve already surpassed 1,000 pounds for the season,” Landes said. “And honestly, we could easily have another 1,000 more with what’s still left to harvest.”

Local farmers rented the site until 2021. But then it sat unused until a new venture, known as Henderson Farm, started up before the 2024 growing season. The effort is funded by a Portland-based nonprofit called Ecotrust and fueled by the work of volunteers and local contractors, including Landes.

The farm is a bright spot for the local food system and southeast Alaska, both of which rely heavily on food that’s shipped in from incredibly far away. That process results in less fresh, less nutritious produce, Landes said, and it leads to extraordinary amounts of waste.

As she sees it, nothing encourages cutting down on waste more than toiling in the soil week after week. She points to some healthy-looking purple cabbages, which she says require a lot of time – and effort – to grow.

“I’m gonna use every freaking leaf of every cabbage that I harvest,” Landes said. “And the pieces that I can’t are gonna go into compost to make my cabbages next year.”

This year was the farm’s first full season. As of early November, seeds planted on about three quarters of an acre had yielded more than 2,800 pounds of food and counting. Landes says there will be greens to glean through the first snowfall.

None of the produce is sold. It’s all shared throughout the community, either in exchange for work or for free.

A significant chunk goes to the farm’s volunteers and contractors. But it also goes to the local senior center, a food pantry in Klukwan, a food hub in Mosquito Lake, and other community groups – like volunteer firefighters.

Helping distribute the food is one of the best parts of the job, Landes said.

“Generally, I get to go around and be the little vegetable fairy and say, ‘Thank you for the time that you give to other people, here’s a bag of peas,'” she said.

The operation is far from easy. But the farm is in somewhat of a sweet spot when compared to other parts of the Chilkat Valley and Southeast more broadly.

Taken together, the property’s workable soil, Alaska’s long summer days, and Haines’ relatively dry and warm climate are a big help.

“It’s not perfect,” she said. But “in many, many ways, the daylight itself here, with the right distribution of rain, does the work for you.”

Looking ahead to next year, Landes said she wants to continue recruiting more volunteers and potentially expand the growing area to a full acre. She also has a more specific, personal goal: making an all-Alaska gumbo.

That will hinge in part on how her okra – which grows well in hot, dry conditions – does next year.

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.