Joan Carle’s dog, Rocky, a graham cracker-colored mix with long ears and short legs, has become famous in Alaska since I first met Carl in April. She said she has been seeing pictures of him on Facebook for the past few months. She was rescued after Typhoon Halon washed away more than half of the homes in Kipnuk, a coastal Alaska Native village of 700 people.
Although we’re based in Alaska’s largest city, the Anchorage Daily News travels to small communities like Kipnak as often as possible to cover a state twice the size of Texas. We strive to report multiple articles at once to justify the expense of airfare. It costs the same to take a small plane to a remote village as it does to fly to New York. But rarely do we have the opportunity to document a community right before breaking news arrives.
You may not have heard much about typhoons. It started as a tropical storm, dumping record rain on parts of Japan, then spiraling toward Alaska. By the time the storm reached our shores, the storm’s debris was still strong enough to flood two villages, wash away homes and kill three people.
I’m writing to you about this storm because photojournalist Mark Lester and I happened to be visiting Kipnuku just before the typhoon. Mark returned to cover the evacuation, giving us a look at an Alaskan village on the front lines of climate change just before and after the devastation.
The story of the destruction of Carl’s hometown and the nearby village of Kwigilingok adds an exclamation point to long-simmering fears about the future of Alaska’s coastal villages. Which town will disappear next? Where will climate refugees live? Should their previous home be rebuilt? If not, what does that mean for the future of these communities?
In May, Emily Schwing, a reporter for KYUK public radio in Bethel and ProPublica’s local news network, wrote about the climate refugees the government helped relocate from the Yup’ik village of Newtok. In November, she covered Alaska’s crumbling public school infrastructure and wrote about how a school in Kipnuk served as an emergency shelter for hundreds of residents during a storm surge from Furlong.
When Mark and I first visited the school building in April, we were reporting a very different kind of story. Karl’s son, Justin Paul, spent seven years in prison after being charged with murder in Alaska’s icyly slow justice system, where serious cases can take up to 10 years to resolve. Paul’s case was ultimately dismissed because the evidence against him was found to be seriously flawed. After being released and battling addiction on the streets of Anchorage, Paul returned to live with Carl in the small house in Kipnak, where he was born and raised.
Our visit to their village before the storm gave Mark the opportunity to record a version of Kipnuk that no longer exists and may never exist again.
Justin Paul leaves Joan Carle’s house after his lunch break from work in April. Mark Lester/ADN Paul’s mother Karl cried as she described her son’s situation at her home in Kipnuku in April. Mark Lester/ADN
The people we met in the spring were then airlifted to emergency shelters in an evacuation the state had never seen before. They arrived at Bethel by helicopter and small plane. Some remained in regional hubs. Others were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of a huge Alaska Air National Guard cargo plane bound for Anchorage. Many will stay for weeks in Anchorage’s convention center and sports arenas that have been turned into emergency shelters.
Five days after the storm, Mark and one of the village’s few holdouts toured Kipnuk in the back of an all-terrain vehicle.
The floods devastated communities that, like other parts of the coast, were settling into the melting permafrost. Mark reported that the center of the village resembled a collapsed Jenga tower, with rectangular houses scattered about. Most were pulled up from the mountains by violent floods and deposited elsewhere. Some were surprisingly intact, but the places they had slept were muddy, waterlogged, damaged and uninhabitable. Mark noticed that the hustle and bustle of daily life we had seen earlier this year had disappeared, replaced by an eerie void.
Zacharias John looks on at the devastation left by Furlong in Kipnuk on October 17th. John decides to stay in the village and help the few people left in the village. Mark Lester/ADN
When the storm first hit, it took Karl’s family five hours to travel three blocks from their home to the school’s temporary shelter. Karl’s son Raymond helped the elders climb over the debris on the ground. Fragments of the house piled up on the town’s promenade. She said the whole village smelled like diesel fuel, or spilled stove oil.
Villagers had to distribute food stored in the school building to the students. “One cracker and one hash brown,” Carl said per person. Eventually, volunteers recovered dried indigenous foods such as fish, berries, and elk meat from the remaining houses.
“We gave more food to the children and the men who were working on the rescue,” Karl said.
A volunteer pilot flew Rocky from Kipnuk to safety. “I used the gasoline myself.”
Carl said a house was floating 24 miles away. Kipnuku’s remains from several above-ground graves had been seen near the town’s airport.
The storm, whose effects were later linked by the Alaska Climate Research Center to global warming, killed 67-year-old Ella Mae Kashatok of Kwigilingok. State troopers said the house she was living in collapsed and drifted toward the Bering Sea. Two of her family members, Vernon Pabil, 71, and Chester Kashatok, 41, have not been found.
During the furlong period, a house rested on the river bank opposite Kipnuk. Mark Lester/ADN
Paul flew to Bethel and then to Togiak, a coastal village 140 miles from Kipnuk that was less affected by the storm. Karl, who has diabetes, said he was evacuated from Kipnuk by Black Hawk helicopter. She was sitting next to a two-year-old girl whose name she didn’t know who was traveling without her parents. To keep the toddler occupied and calm, Carl looked out the window and seemed interested in the view, she said.
Kipnuk’s culture of self-sufficiency made villagers especially equipped to survive the storm’s aftermath, Karl said. Hunters regularly face life-or-death decisions, she said. The days of famine were not that long ago. The elders taught everyone to dry and preserve food.
But Karl will no longer be able to experience that kind of life in the village.
Kipnuku in April 2025. Karl doesn’t know if the village will survive after Furlong’s destruction. Mark Lester/ADN
Although her house is one of the few to survive, built in the late 1970s or early 1980s on pilings moored deep in the tundra, she is not optimistic about returning to the village full time.
When I asked her if there would be a Kipnuk in the future, she burst into tears.
“It might be over,” she said over a recent Whopper lunch at Burger King in Anchorage. “It’s a ghost town.”
Children play basketball in Kipnuku in April. Mark Lester/ADN
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