Western Alaska Yup’ik village floods as river rises from a series of storms

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Storm-battered residents in the western Alaska village of Napakiak were preparing for the third storm in a week Tuesday, days after a minister had to use a front loader to free people from flooded homes.

Napakiak, a Yup’ik village of about 350 residents in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, was flooded Sunday after heavy rains swelled the Kuskokwim River.

Conditions beforehand were “pretty brutal,” with winds and a lot of rain, said Job Hale, the minister of Armory of God Baptist Church. Then the water suddenly started rising as river currents pushed into town.

It caught everyone by surprise because it wasn’t the normal spring or fall flooding, which residents prepare for, Hale said. People scrambled to move vehicles to higher ground, remove firewood from underneath their raised homes and secure water tanks.

“I have a front loader, which became very handy because there were several people that actually got stuck in their homes,” Hale said. Even though homes are elevated, the water level was 3 feet (about 1 meter) or more and coming up through floors.

Three times he maneuvered the front loader to people’s doors, and they climbed inside the bucket for a ride to dry ground.

It was also used to rescue one person who needed medical aid, Hale said, adding that several residents told him they couldn’t remember flooding this bad in years.

The water started to recede Sunday night, but some parts of town were still swamped two days later.

Erosion has long been a problem in many Alaska communities including Napakiak, where it isn’t unusual to lose 100 feet (30 meters) of riverbank a year.

The erosion is caused in part by climate change, with warming temperatures melting permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, making riverbanks unstable.

It’s so pervasive in Napakiak that the village school had to be closed this year because it’s close to falling into the river. Plans are to demolish the building and have students attend classes in temporary buildings until a new school being built farther from the river is completed next summer, superintendent Andrew Anderson said.

In an ironic twist, Sunday’s flooding forced the cancellation of a farewell party for the old school.

The weekend storms caused coastal flooding in several other western Alaska communities, but there were no reports of health issues or major property damage, state emergency officials said.

Sunday’s was the second storm to affect the Bethel area, the hub community for southwest Alaska about 400 miles (640 kilometers) west of Anchorage. Napakiak is about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Bethel, but there are no roads between the two communities until winter, when the river becomes a highway after it freezes.

The third storm was expected later Tuesday as the remnants of typhoon Ampil were forecast to impact parts of Alaska’s west coast.

This storm doesn’t look as potent as the weekend event, but Christian Landry, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage, said the Bethel area will get another round of precipitation and gusty winds through the night as the system moves north toward Nome.