Four months after the remnants of a tropical typhoon wrecked communities in Western Alaska, hundreds of people who were displaced are considering abandoning their village altogether.

Tribal members from Kipnuk, a community of about 700 that was among the hardest hit, are now preparing for a possible complete relocation. Working in temporary quarters in downtown Anchorage, tribal workers spent weeks manning phones and computers to try to collect votes about relocation options from all the adults among Kipnuk’s enrolled tribal residents.

The tribal leaders have picked out two potential relocation sites, both at least 40 feet above sea level, and are open to other suggestions. By Friday, they had collected all the votes, and are now tallying the results to determine what the consensus is.

The tribal vote is intended to be a final decision, said Rayna Paul, environmental director for the Native Village of Kipnuk, the tribal government.

“Oh my gosh, we’re not going back,” Paul said in an interview in her temporary office in Anchorage.

The storms that came with the remnants of Typhoon Halong comprised one of the state’s most devastating natural disasters in recent decades, and it spurred what was the biggest air evacuation in at least half a century, with about 1,600 people moved by military aircraft from the storm-stricken region.

Paul and tribal officials from Kwigillingok, another heavily damaged village, described the ravages during a panel discussion at the Alaska Forum on the Environment earlier this month.

Impacts included houses that were pushed off their foundations and sent afloat; graves washed away; vital stockpiles of fish, berries and other wild foods harvested over the past year were ruined. Halong-related flooding and winds inundated the region with new risks: spilled heating oil, diesel, sewage and other noxious and hazardous substances.

The extent of the damage was shocking, Dustin Evon, Kwigillingok’s tribal resilience coordinator, said at the forum.

“I think we all did not expect the storm to be this catastrophic until houses started floating away and people started calling,” he said.

The storm’s total toll has yet to be calculated, as assessments could not be completed before winter set in, but Bryan Fisher, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, put the tab at $125 million as of the start of February.

[Many Halong evacuees in Anchorage have relocated to apartments. It’s unclear when they can return home]

Food-security and cultural losses

The damage goes beyond dollars, and they added to damages already underway years before Halong became the latest in a series of powerful recent storms.

Paul said changes have been especially noticeable since ex-Typhoon Merbok hit the same region in 2022. The land and waters around Kipnuk have lost many of the qualities that supported generations of Yup’ik residents.

Blackberries and crowberries have disappeared, possibly because of saltwater inundating the sinking tundra, she said. Blackfish, a freshwater species, are “nowhere to be found,” she said. Tomcod have also been scarce. Other species appear to have suffered, she said; there were reports prior to Halong of several dead white foxes.

Successive storms have pushed saltwater inland, contaminating drinking water and hastening the permafrost thaw that was already underway beneath the tundra’s surface because of climate change.

If residents decide to leave, the biggest challenge may be securing the money to move the village. There is no single agency in charge of village relocation, a problem cited by organizations like the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium as a hindrance to progress.

However, the concept of moving villages to escape hazards has plenty of historic precedent in Alaska.

In the most recent case, the village of Newtok, on the fast-eroding banks of the Ninglick River, moved to a more secure inland site called Mertarvik. Conducted amid funding uncertainties and bedeviled by logistical problems, the move took decades.

Historic moves that involve less infrastructure have been simpler.

For example, Chevak, a coastal village about 100 miles north of Kipnuk that also sustained damage from the storm, is itself a relocated site. The current village was established in the mid-20th century, a switch from the site now known as Old Chevak, which was considered to be too prone to floods.

Kipnuk’s current site is not where the original settlement was located. An earlier site was used at least seasonally before the current site was recognized in 1922 by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, according to Alaska records. The older site had been rejected by the federal government as place for a permanent village because it lacked barge access, Paul said. The government built a school, part of a pattern that tied Indigenous Alaskans who previously moved around by season to permanent communities.

The old Kipnuk site is now one of the two candidate relocation sites that the tribal government has selected for consideration. Both are located at least 40 feet above sea level, Paul said.

There are also cases in Alaska history where the federal government moved fairly quickly to relocate disaster-stricken communities. It took about three years after the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 to completely rebuild the city of Valdez in a different and more stable spot.

Rebuilding versus relocating

If Kipnuk residents decide to stay rather than go, a full return to the current village site will require a comprehensive rebuild that would take several years, officials say.

Fisher, of the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, broached that subject in the Alaska Forum on the Environment presentation earlier this month.

Rebuilding would start with new mapping and new data about how far flood waters will spread, he said.

“The land has completely changed from what it looked like before the storm in October,” he said. “So we have to reassess our understanding of what the water can do now that the land is completely different, both under people’s homes or where their homes were, and kind of community-wide,” he said.

Fisher noted that structures raised above the tundra on stilts fared better in the storm, indicating that those features might be incorporated into any new or repaired buildings.

Evon had firsthand experience with the benefit of stilts. While he was helping carry out the emergency response at the Kwigillingok school, one of the few village structures on stilts, his own home floated away.

Sheryl Musgrove, director of the Alaska Climate Justice Program at the Alaska Institute for Justice, is skeptical of that plan.

If the floodwaters were eight feet deep, that would suggest that buildings need to be 10 feet aboveground, said Musgrove, who is helping Kipnuk’s tribal government and sharing its Anchorage office space for now.

“I don’t know how realistic it is,” she said. Engineers have said the ground has changed and pilings may have to be driven down 100 feet, she added. “Is that realistic, having a 100-foot piling for each home?” she asked.

To Paul, there’s no point in putting that investment in the same place instead of a new and safer spot.

“They’re trying to rebuild when we’re going to be hit by another extreme weather event,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

The expectation of more storms creating this type of damage is justified, according to experts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Strong fall storms in the Bering Sea, including ex-typhoons, are nothing new, said Rick Thoman, a scientist with UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness.

What is different now is the repeated occurrence of such storms causing severe damage in populated areas of Western Alaska’s mainland, Thoman said in a presentation at the Alaska Forum on the Environment.

Ex-Typhoon Halong was especially unusual in the path that it took: shooting past St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, he said.

“This is only the second storm of this intensity to make that, to shoot that gap in the autumn, since 1950,” he said. “That is an extremely rare track for a storm of this intensity in the fall.”

An ex-typhoon is a particular meteorological event, Thoman said. A typhoon is a warm-water storm in a relatively confined geographic space; an ex-typhoon sends winds horizontally over vaster distances, he said. “The area covered by strong winds expands greatly,” he said. And at high latitudes, ex-typhoons become extremely powerful, he said.

Since 1970 more than 60 ex-typhoons have reached Alaska, but more than half of them were limited to the western and central Aleutians, he said. Some reached the Bristol Bay and Alaska Peninsula region, and a few reached the Gulf of Alaska.

But since the 1970s, there have been only four ex-typhoons that moved into the Arctic after sweeping through the Northern Bering Sea coast: Carlo in 1996, Merbok in 2022, Ampil in 2024 and Halong last October.

Ampil did not produce flooding in Alaska, but it did cause record-high summer winds, Thoman said. And both Merbok and Halong were extremely destructive and expensive disasters fueled by unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific.

Three powerful ex-typhoon storms hitting Western Alaska’s mainland in the last four years is notable, Thoman said at the forum.

“One, twice, coincidence. Three? OK, now we’ve got an issue, right?” he said at the forum.

For the hundreds of displaced residents like Paul, relocation is a necessity, even if it is just temporary.

She is getting used to apartment life in a three-story building in East Anchorage, with Chugach Mountain views that are unlike anything on the horizon of the tundra where Kipnuk is situated. She is also trying to adjust to the urban pace of life.

“It’s something different,” she said. “Seems like people don’t sleep.”But she said there have been some positive aspects of the move.

Her nephews are attending Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School and report that even though the school is much bigger than what they are used to — one of the biggest high schools in the state — the environment has been welcoming, Paul said. Some of the evacuated kids are even in a combined Kipnuk-Kwigillingok basketball team, she said.

And Paul is heartened by the sight of ducks flying around Anchorage. “When I see ducks, l’m like, ‘Woo-hoo! Soup,’” she said with a laugh.

She has no idea how long she will be in Anchorage — or even the location of her house, which was one of those in Kipnuk that floated away.

“I don’t have a house to go back to, you know. So very uncertain,” she said.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.