Western

Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed an extension of the state’s disaster declaration on Saturday to continue emergency response and recovery efforts following the Western Alaska storms, including the remnants of Typhoon Halong.

The original disaster declaration signed on Oct. 9 was set to expire on Sunday.

“The 30-day extension will enable recovery efforts to continue unencumbered so that the maximized amount of work can be completed before the onset of the winter freeze up in the region,” according to a statement from the governor’s office.

The governor requested concurrence from leaders of the Alaska State Legislature and was met with support.

“I am in complete agreement on the 30 day extension and appreciate the Governor’s amended Disaster Declaration,” said Alaska State Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, in a statement.

“It’s been a yeoman’s job by everyone, and I’m very impressed by the dedication and the amount of time put in,” said Alaska Speaker of the House Rep. Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham.

He said the extension is necessary. “It just makes good sense,” he said. “In a race with freeze-up and making as much progress as possible to get local residents back in their homes, if that is possible, in this very short amount of time that’s available.”

The disaster recovery effort on the Western Alaska coast is still underway, almost a month after a series of fall storms damaged or devastated coastal villages and displaced thousands of residents, primarily in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region. Recovery operations are focused on restoring critical infrastructure, including water, power, communications, and emergency home and boardwalk repairs, according to an update on Friday from the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The state’s disaster response effort is coordinating with federal agencies, regional tribal organizations, non-profits and local partners. The Trump administration announced a federal disaster declaration for Alaska on Oct. 22, promising a 100 percent cost share for the state’s relief efforts for 90 days, through January, according to the governor’s office.

The Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management did not respond to a request for a cost estimate of the disaster relief effort to date, on Monday.

As of Friday, the most recent division update, the state has received 1,400 applications for state Individual Assistance and 719 applications for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Applications are still open.

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.

Haines and Skagway have joined communities across Alaska that are doing what they can to support the more than one thousand people displaced by ex-Typhoon Halong last month.

Skagway’s donation drive is focused on clothing and gear, as opposed to food. Residents have until the end of the day on Wednesday to drop items from a long list at the Dahl Memorial Clinic, the local health care facility. Donations will be handled by nonprofits in Anchorage.

“The items that they’re looking for are clothes of any sort, preferably new, sleeping bags and pillows and hygiene items like toothbrushes and things of that nature,” said Albert Wall, the clinic’s executive director.

Wall emphasized that people should bring items that are either new or gently used – and clean. Other acceptable donations include air mattresses, duffle bags, cell phone chargers and crafting supplies.

“We’ve had a pretty good response so far,” Wall said.

In Haines, meanwhile, the Chilkoot Indian Association initially asked the community to drop off traditional, harvested foods. But council President James Hart says they will accept any food donations, as long as they’re shelf stable and not expired.

“The preference would be something that you harvested,” he said. “But we shouldn’t be pushing anything away.”

On Monday, at the tribe’s downtown office, there were several boxes of canned goods, including sockeye salmon, homemade applesauce, highbush cranberry juice and hooligan oil.

Soon, there will also be three cases of canned seal meat. Hart, along with locals Zack James and Nels Lynch, harvested the seal in late October to contribute to the effort.

Hart said he knows first-hand how important it is to help when communities are struck by disaster, referring to the 2020 atmospheric river event in Haines that triggered widespread destruction and a fatal landslide.

“I know how much we pulled together as a community, and how much outside help we received, so having the opportunity to give back in that way is special,” he said.

“My heart goes out to all those folks and the challenges they’re going to be going through,” Hart added. “They just went through a whole harvest season, and I’d assume all of that has been lost. That’s so hard to hear and think about and even fathom.”

On Wednesday, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game will open an emergency moose hunt in Southwest Alaska, near the town of Quinhagak, in order to help victims of ex-Typhoon Halong, which devastated communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta last month.

It’s the second emergency hunt that Fish and Game has opened to help storm victims refill their freezers before winter deepens, and it’s only the latest example of how Alaska state agencies have helped in unlikely ways after last month’s disaster, which killed at least one person and displaced hundreds.

Elsewhere, officials from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development have been coordinating new schools for evacuees who needed to move to Bethel or Anchorage.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation has been helping wrangle fuel tanks set adrift in floods. Workers from the Division of Forestry and Fire Protection have been helping muck out homes, remove debris and deliver supplies to villages alongside the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities and the Alaska National Guard.

In Anchorage, hundreds of miles away from the villages hardest hit by the storm, about 20 employees of the state-owned Alaska Housing Finance Corporation worked for weeks to find long-term shelter for hundreds of Alaskans who lost their homes in the disaster.

On Monday, state and city officials in Anchorage said they had closed the last mass shelters being used by evacuees because everyone had found hotels or apartments suitable for long-term use.

“This isn’t something we normally have done,” said AHFC CEO/Executive Director Bryan Butcher on Oct. 22 of the push to help evacuees find housing. “There have been different times … that people have reached out to us and asked for assistance, and we try to help when we can.”

Butcher said AHFC employees spent time checking for available state-owned housing and tried to connect evacuees with available apartments and housing across the state.

“We’ll play whatever role we need to play,” he said in late October. “And at this point, it’s just the gathering of units and then trying to help kind of piece it together so it makes the most sense and has the least amount of disruption.”

At the Department of Fish and Game, Ryan Scott is the director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, which oversees hunting practices and issued the emergency hunting order this week.

“Our staff has been in communication with the communities, plus people who evacuated to town. And you know, I’m very proud of them, but I’m super thankful that we could help out where we could,” he said.

Scott said the department frequently gets requests for emergency hunts, but they’re only allowed in places where the population of prey animals is large enough to support them.

While the two emergency hunts in Southwest Alaska are intended to help people affected by the disaster, any state resident can participate if they meet the guidelines.

The food generated by the hunt may even be able to help people who evacuated from the area; Alaska has a system of proxy hunting that allows someone to hunt on behalf of someone else who is elderly or disabled.

In addition, evacuees may be able to take advantage of winter hunts or small-game hunts, or other subsistence activities, Scott said.

“We get into this type of work not only for the wildlife resources, but across the board it’s about the people too, you know? And then whatever we can do to help Alaskans, that’s what we want to do.”

For wage-earning Alaskans who were displaced by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, a powerful storm that lashed the western coast of the state earlier this month, qualifying for one special type of federal assistance could be a cinch.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Disaster Unemployment Assistance program provides financial benefits to people who cannot perform their normal jobs because of disaster interference. One qualification for the benefits — $153 to $370 per week for up to 27 weeks, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development — is an inability to reach normal worksites.

Among the hundreds of Yukon-Kuskokwim region residents who were evacuated by military flights to Anchorage, nearly 500 miles to the east of their home villages, those that held wage-earning jobs in their home villages easily meet that requirement.

Beyond that weekly benefit, many evacuees will need to earn income over what might be a prolonged period away from home. To meet that need, companies and government agencies are seeking to place evacuees in temporary jobs and training programs.

At the forefront of those efforts is Calista Corporation, the Alaska Native corporation for the Yukon-Kuskokwim region. It has a series of programs underway to help displaced residents find work and training.

Cleanup and recovery work is a logical opportunity for people from storm-damaged villages, said Thom Leonard, Calista’s vice president for corporate affairs. But there are some obstacles to starting those recovery jobs.

“One of the challenges is: When are they going to go, and where are they going to stay if they are able to go back to the villages?” he said. Villages that lack power, water and other basic services might not yet be able to house the people who would do the cleanup and recovery work to make those villages habitable again, he said. “It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg situation,” he said.

Calista’s construction and environmental services subsidiary, Calista Brice, has been enlisted in the disaster response and is hiring people from affected villages, Leonard said.

More generally, Calista and other partners held a career workshop on Wednesday for evacuees at the William A. Egan Civic and Convention Center in Anchorage, and more such events are planned. Through those events, Calista’s workforce and shareholder team, which operates a year-round program, is connecting displaced residents with job-training opportunities.

Calista has also offered temporary office space to tribal governments from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, the coastal villages most heavily hit by the storm. The Kipnuk tribal government has taken Calista up on that offer, Leonard said.

Among the individuals getting help from Calista at the Egan Center on Tuesday were Carl and Stephanie Anaver of Kipnuk.

Stephanie inquired about the possibility of working as a home health care aide for her aged sister, and Carl was seeking a building maintenance job similar to the work he was doing at the Kipnuk Clinic. Regina Therachik, manager of Calista’s workforce shareholder development program, counseled them in Yup’ik.

Anchorage was not their first choice for a relocation spot, Stephanie Anaver said. “I wanted to stay in Bethel. But since Bethel was full, they brought us here,” she said in a brief interview.

Rather than staying in Anchorage, the couple has made a temporary home in Wasilla with a family member, she said.

The time in Southcentral Alaska is shaping up to be a period of limbo for the couple. Exactly when the couple will return to Kipnuk, or even if that is possible, is unknown, Stephanie said.

“If they relocate Kipunk to higher ground, yeah, I’ll go back to Kipnuk,” she said.

Hundreds of students displaced by the storm devastation of ex-Typhoon Halong in Western Alaska are entering school in other communities, including Bethel and Anchorage.

Deena Bishop, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, said most displaced students have enrolled in Bethel or Anchorage schools. She estimates 100 students have enrolled in Bethel, remaining in the regional hub of Western Alaska and the Lower Kuskokwim School District. State officials estimate 140 students have enrolled in the Anchorage School District so far, according to an update on Sunday.

Students have also enrolled in other schools across the state, but in smaller numbers, depending on where families have relocated after the storm, Bishop said. Those include the Nenana and Fairbanks areas, the Kenai Peninsula, Matanuska-Susitna Valley Borough, and other rural areas, as well as boarding schools.

“All the support from the state, including from the Department of Education, has been in support of what the family would like to do,” Bishop said.

For those in Anchorage, she said the Anchorage School District is coordinating with state, tribal and non-profit partners to provide services to students and families — including transportation from emergency shelters to schools, health services, meals, and English translation services for predominantly Yup’ik families.

The Anchorage School District said it is trying to keep displaced students together. It has enrolled a number of students in the Yup’ik immersion program at College Gate Elementary, which provides bilingual classes and cultural activities, as well as the Alaska Native Charter School, Lake Otis Elementary, A.J. Wendler Middle School, Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School and King Tech High School.

Bishop said teachers and school communities are welcoming students, and “doing an excellent job in just a devastating situation.”

Anchorage Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt was not available for an interview, but echoed the district’s commitment in an update to the school board on Oct. 21. “There was one common trend, which is that our teachers, our principals and our community members are standing with Western Alaska, and they were there to greet the students and make them feel as welcome as possible during this difficult time,” he said.

Many students left their villages in the mass evacuation in the days after the storm devastation, with just one bag they could carry. Bryantt acknowledged the culture shock and trauma of the displacement as families relocate and resettle. Evacuees face challenges like finding housing and replacing clothing and personal belongings. Some are reuniting with family, neighbors and pets.

“We’re not just here to teach them. We need to address the whole child, and in this moment, as strong as these students are, they’re going through trauma and it’s going to take a lot of work,” he said. “But we’re going to put that in, because these kids are worth it, and they deserve a wonderful education that we want to offer them, in ASD, for as long as they’d like to be here.”

Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew “Hannibal” Anderson said the re-enrollment of their students into other schools in Bethel and Anchorage is going well, and added the districts are working with families through the ongoing logistics of replacing documentation and finding long term housing. Particularly in Anchorage, he said there’s an effort to keep Lower Kuskokwim students and classes together.

“So Anchorage [School District] has really very much been the key in helping our students find places and to find opportunities for more of our students to be together rather than randomly spread throughout the Anchorage community,” he said.

Anderson said some teachers and paraprofessionals who evacuated from the west coast region have even begun working for ASD, but the majority have stayed in their district and communities where they’re working out new positions.

He said as the students flow to different parts of the state, the district is working  to reassign the teachers who stay. That involves considering their certifications and any vacant positions that already exist in the district, as well as new positions that have emerged as displaced students enroll.

“The primary effort is to support as well as we can the already existing relationships between students and teachers, and then see what we can do with that as time moves forward,” Anderson said.

Rural schools at center of Typhoon recovery

The Lower Kuskokwim School District encompasses most of the region hardest hit by ex-Typhoon Halong. Many of its 22 village schools served as emergency shelters in the days after the storm, and are now centers for the recovery and relief efforts. The region is accessible only by boat and plane.

Some 400 people sheltered in the school in Kwigillingok, and more than 500 people in Kipnuk, two of the hardest-hit communities in the first days after the storm, before mass evacuations began.

Anderson commended the schools and staff on the frontlines of the disaster for “receiving so many of the community members into the shelters and there and taking care of them, providing all they could for the needs of large numbers of people.”

And now he said many school staff are involved in the relief efforts, as schools have utilities and space to serve as central community sites and house emergency crews responding to storm damage. Anderson said schools are often the largest and most stable facilities in their communities, so it is a “great contribution” to the recovery effort.

Some schools in the region are still grappling with power outages, including Kipnuk, Kwigillingok, Kotlik, Nightmute and Akiak. Akiak has been without power since a power plant failure in mid September. Others that suffered less storm damage are up and running, Anderson said. “Far and away, most of the schools in the district are functioning,” he said.

Disaster funding for rural schools

Bishop said disaster relief is the state’s immediate priority. But as students and families find more permanent housing and get settled into schools, she said DEED is applying to federal grants so that the state can fund districts’ extra costs.

She said school districts are taking care of students and making sure they don’t have to wait for services, so now the state will work with districts to figure out financial support that adheres to statute.

She said “it was definitely the message of the governor that either receiving schools, as well as the Lower Kuskokwim schools, should be compensated, and we are to work on figuring that out.”

She said districts will also qualify for disaster relief from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under the federal disaster declaration. “Each of the schools affected could get upwards of a $250,000 grant,” she said.

Bishop said the long term impacts remain to be seen, and the ultimate goal is to get residents back to their communities. “We don’t want anyone to get lost in a big city, and we don’t want anyone to get lost anywhere. We want to be able to work with the state and those other divisions to restore those communities, to create healthy communities again, where they can live and work and go to school together,” she said.

State officials estimate more than 1,500 people are displaced by the storm disaster. The state has received 1,104 applications for state individual assistance, according to a statement from the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management on Tuesday. Applications are open on the state’s website, through Dec. 9. Individual assistance is also available from FEMA and from the American Red Cross.