The other Alaska airlift: Volunteers save dogs from a flooded Alaska village, 1 tiny plane at a time

SEATTLE (AP) — The special delivery arrived in a plastic storage box after a chartered flight in bouncy single-propeller plane. Veterinarian Susan Shaffer Sookram snipped the zip ties securing the lid and greeted the cargo: four dogs, one with a gray collar bearing its name, Happy.

“What a scary ride!” she said. “You made it!”

As officials in Alaska work around the clock on one of the most significant airlift operations in state history — evacuating more than 1,000 people from remote, flood-battered villages on the coast of the Bering Sea — another rescue operation is playing out: getting the dogs left behind to safety, in hopes of later reuniting them with their owners.

The pet shelters closest to the devastated villages are in Bethel, a regional hub around 90 miles (150 kilometers) away by boat or plane.

When Bethel Friends of Canines, a nonprofit that helps rehome animals, learned that 50 to 100 dogs might be abandoned in one of the villages, Kipnuk, it scrambled to charter a plane to evacuate them.

“It costs us $3,000 to do this so and we don’t know how many times we’re gonna have to do it,” organizer Jesslyn Elliott said by phone Wednesday. “We’ve never had a natural disaster to this, like, magnitude. So this is all very, very foreign and new to us. So we’re just kind of winging it.”

The first flight arrived in Bethel on Wednesday night, and more happened Thursday. Dozens of dogs have passed through her kennel since the floods began. The nonprofit had raised more than $22,000 after pleading on Facebook for donations.

The flooding, caused by remnants of Typhoon Halong, has damaged homes in 11 small rural communities, with no more than a few hundred residents, according to FEMA. Many homes cannot be repaired until next summer as winter temperatures and snow are forecast for this month.

State officials began airlifting people to Anchorage on Wednesday, as local leaders in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, near the Bering Sea, asked to evacuate residents and as shelters in Bethel neared capacity. At least one resident of Kwigillingok was confirmed dead, and the search for two others was called off after their how was swept away.

Pets were not allowed on the military evacuation flights. State officials have said that the evacuation of people is the priority.

Bethel Friends of Canines received dogs throughout the week as people fleeing their homes arrived by boat and by plane. There are no roads connecting towns in the area.

Many of the pets owners want them back soon, but need time to prepare temporary lodgings in cities like Anchorage and Nome, which are more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) away.

Before the devastating floods, Bethel Friends of Canines typically held 15 to 20 dogs at any one time. Now as many as 15 dogs have arrived on a single flight. Elliott expects most of the additional dogs to stay in Bethel temporarily before being reunited with their owners or extended family that can foster them.

At least eight dogs had been reunited with owners in Anchorage as of Thursday morning, she said.

Homes in affected villages are so damaged that they many not be livable in the winter, emergency management officials said Wednesday, and forecasters said rain and snow could arrive this weekend.

With the human population in Kipnuk shrinking each day, the animal caretakers in Bethel realized they had to act fast, before everyone who knew the dogs was gone.

“There’s going to be nobody left there,” said Sookram, the veterinarian, in a phone interview. “We’re having to kind of accelerate how the animals are going to be leaving places only accessible by, at first, helicopter and now small planes,”

Some of the last people to stay behind and serve the community are teachers. Schools in flooded towns have served as emergency shelters and meeting places through the relief effort.

Back in Kipnuk, the dog with the gray collar, Happy, was found waiting on its owner’s clothes, refusing to move or eat, by teacher Jacqui Lang. She said in a text message that the dog has since been reunited with its family.

She’s one of two or three teachers who helped wrangle the pets to be loaded at the airstrip, according to Lower Kuskokwim School District Superintendent Andrew ‘Hannibal’ Anderson.

When Bethel Friends of Canines worker Matthew Morgan landed in Kipnuk on Wednesday, the teachers had fed the dogs, coaxed them into crates and labeled them with tags listing their owners.

“You’ve got some heroes out in Kipnuk. They’re like the last people left there,” Morgan said. Without them, “it would have been chasing dogs all night in the mud.”

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Associated Press writer Jesse Bedayn in Denver contributed.