Congressional delegation pledges support as FEMA joins Western Alaska storm response

A day after Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked President Donald Trump to approve a major disaster declaration for Western Alaska to unlock funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed it had received the request and sent staff to Alaska, but did not provide a timeline for approving the disaster declaration.

“We’re in receipt of the governor’s request and working closely with Alaska and talking with the leadership hand in hand,” the FEMA press office wrote Saturday in an unsigned statement.

The request for the disaster declaration came days after the remnants of Typhoon Halong battered several villages in Western Alaska, leaving one person dead and two missing as dozens of homes floated off their foundations. Hundreds of residents from Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and other communities have been evacuated to Bethel and Anchorage.

As of Friday, 64 FEMA staff were dedicated to the Alaska storm response, the officials wrote, including two state liaison officers, two tribal liaisons and two mass care specialists who are embedded at the State Emergency Operations Center in Anchorage to provide technical assistance to the state and tribal partners.

FEMA also activated a response coordination center in Washington state and began collecting imagery of the impacted areas to provide early damage assessments to responders, officials wrote.

Members of Alaska’s congressional delegation in speeches at the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention on Friday and Saturday praised the response from local, state and federal agencies.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski called the response from FEMA and other organizations “fabulous.”

However, she said she remained concerned about next steps in assisting impacted communities and residents.

“As with every disaster, it seems that complications always come when you are in that recovery end of things, when you’re actually working through individual assistance applications,” she told reporters in Anchorage.

She said there could be challenges for Yup’ik speakers who are not fluent in English in filling out FEMA forms that are not adapted to the unique concerns of rural Alaska.

“So I’m not worried about the immediate — I’m worried about what comes next,” she said.

Murkowski, along with U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan and U.S. Rep. Nick Begich, pledged their commitment to ensure the federal government assists impacted individuals.

Begich said he intends to work with Murkowski and Sullivan “to pursue every opportunity available to ensure that families have both the immediate relief that they need and the long-term support that they need to get back on their feet.”

Sullivan praised a social media post from Vice President JD Vance, who wrote on Friday that the federal government is working to get help to affected Alaskans.

“I think that’s good when it comes from the top of the administration,” Sullivan said.

Murkowski was the first member of the congressional delegation to have visited the impacted region, with a short trip to Bethel and Kipnuk on Friday. She provided a more detailed view of what lies ahead during her Anchorage speech.

“It’s pretty powerful to observe first, to hear carefully what the needs are, before we swoop in from Washington or from afar to tell you what to do in your communities,” Murkowski said.

“I want to underscore — what you decide is best, because I will not accept that there are those who are from Washington, D.C., from other parts of the country, who have never been to your region, who have never heard your stories, that they feel that somehow they can determine your future,” Murkowski said, addressing a crowd of hundreds of Alaska Native people from across the state, including the region hit hardest by the storm.

Murkowski said that after meeting with teachers in the Kipnuk school, she thought it was important for children from the affected community to be kept together, even if they are unable to return to their village site for the foreseeable future.

“The more that we can keep these children and these families together in these communities while they are displaced, while they are out of their home, that is what we can do to help them,” Murkowski said.

Murkowski also took time in her speech to respond to the Environmental Protection Agency, which this week defended its decision to rescind a $20 million erosion mitigation grant awarded to Kipnuk — one of the hardest-hit villages — under the previous administration.

In a social media post, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the cancellation of the grant prevented the money from being “swept into the Kuskokwim River.”

Murkowski said she was “offended” by the comment.

“I am outright mad that some have suggested that it is a waste of taxpayer dollars to protect Alaskan communities. We are Americans. Every single person that has been impacted is an American that deserves to be treated with that level of respect,” Murkowski said, eliciting prolonged applause.

The Kipnuk grant would likely not be revived, Murkowski said, “but we’re working to get some portion of that funding to go toward Kipnuk again.”

“We’re still fighting for the funding that we secured, including the resilience grants for Kipnuk that were canceled earlier this year, and while that funding may not have come in time to prevent the disaster that we saw this past week, they may prevent future disasters, and that’s the point,” said Murkowski.

Murkowski said that the Alaska congressional delegation would “keep pushing the administration” to restore funding meant for Alaska, after dozens of grants were canceled earlier this year due to Trump’s targeting of renewable energy and climate change initiatives.

“Simply recovering from this storm isn’t enough,” Murkowski said. “We have to be ready for the next one and the next one to follow, in Kipnuk and in every village, because these once-in-a-century storms are now arriving seemingly every year, and we have to prepare.”

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