Even before Merbok, Native villages were in harm’s way
A trail of coastal flooding reveals gaps in government support to address climate threats
GOLOVIN— Robert “Bobby” Amarok could see the storm building from his kitchen window.
Through paneless glass, he looked straight out onto Golovnin Lagoon where his daughter Lisa used to swim as a girl. That was way before the village’s shoreline had started to shrink to slow erosion.
But after the ex-typhoon, there was nothing gradual about the massive waves that slammed into the beach. The impact chomped away at giant clumps of seaside sod exposing a dramatic underlayer of frozen soil. For Amarok, his daughter and many others in Golovin, it was the first time any had laid eyes on so much permafrost. When the rain finally subsided, the now-naked icy ground was literally sweating in the exposed elements.
The tropical storm system Merbok that moved into western Alaska two weekends ago met an Arctic ecosystem that climate scientists say is very different from just a few decades back. Air and ocean temperatures, intimately synchronized with the formation of annual sea ice, have become warmer and more disruptive compared to a similar storm that pounded the region almost fifty years prior.
Amarok remembers the Bering Sea Storm of 1974 like it was yesterday. “A big one,” he said. “But there was sea ice, that time.” Then as now, he looked out his window in disbelief at the floodwaters that reached his home less than a mile from shore. “The water had never run up that far before,” Amarok, 74, said. In his mind, that’s when Golovin’s seasonal storm surges started to change if not intensify. “Almost every year, now, there’s water that comes up real high.”
The threat of coastal flooding has not been lost on community leaders. In recent years, the City of Golovin was awarded a state grant to hire an engineering firm to help prepare a relocation plan. But today, Golovin Mayor Charlie Black says the effort is more like an expansion project because the idea isn’t to move the entire community but build a new subdivision for some of its 100 residents – Elders like Bobby Amarok who knows he needs to live somewhere that’s safer and on higher
ground.
Golovin’s planning effort are emblematic of Alaska’s unique challenges where sea level rise is happening faster in the Arctic more than anywhere else, and where the impacts are demographically lopsided. Of all the communities faced with chronic erosion, flooding or rapidly melting permafrost statewide, the majority are Alaska Native villages.
According to the Government Accounting Office, as many as 70 federally-recognized tribes out of 229 in Alaska will face climate impacts at rates that exceed any other community in the United States. It means these villages are more threatened than the rest in losing critical infrastructure, traditional subsistence lands or even human life.
But these frontline communities, like Golovin, have largely struggled to find relief. For all the hundreds of millions of dollars in government spending devoted to help villages address the effects of a warming planet, the GAO has found few, if any, success stories. And it’s not a new problem. For fifteen years, the investigative body has repeatedly urged Congress to pass laws that will improve federal efforts to help the most environmentally vulnerable.
The GAO’s most recent call for climate response reform came just as Golovin was starting to pick up the pieces left in Merbok’s path. On Monday, September 19, a new watchdog report was released, calling attention to the fiscal risks facing the federal government in reacting to extreme weather events rather than planning and preparing for them. “Managing climate change is on [the GAO’s High-Risk List] in part because of concerns about the increasing costs of disaster response and recovery efforts,” the report said.
Roughly $315 billion in federal spending have gone to respond to communities across the country ravaged by drought, wildfires, flooding or violent storms – and that’s just between 2015 to 2021. With disaster costs projected to increase, it has many environmental practitioners wondering what it will take to enhance climate resilience programs across a strata of government agencies.
Twyla Thurmond, an Inupiaq consultant with the relocation assistance group Climigration Network, says the recent typhoon should be a wakeup call to politicians. “It’s like the flooding literally has to hit their doorstep to blink an eye at it,” said Thurmond.
A former planner for her home community of Shishmaref, situated on the eroding barrier island of Sarichef off the Chukchi Sea, Thurmond has experienced first-hand how gaps in government funding and response rates are like treating severe wounds with mere band-aids. Three years ago, after giant waves made impassable the only road to the village dump, FEMA aid was able to re-open the critical infrastructure. “But there wasn’t funding to protect it for the next storm season,” said Thurmond.
After Merbok, 100-feet of Shishmaref’s eroding sanitation road washed away. Repairs came in the form of repurposed rock revetments taken from another segment protecting another portion of the road. Three volunteers carried out the work – another temporary fix, for now, but far from a longterm solution.
In the wake of the typhoon, the State of Alaska and the federal government both declared disasters that will unlock millions of dollars in aid to help communities with ongoing recovery efforts – from temporary housing and home repairs, to lowcost loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programs to help individuals and businesses recover from the disaster, according to President Biden’s declaration.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs will also distribute $2.6 million to 45 federally-recognized tribes in the region
– $50,000 for each village for emergency supplies that may not be covered by Alaska’s Individual Assistance Program or FEMA, and an additional $10 million to each village for potable water.
But none of these funds will meet the estimated $2 million that Shishmaref planners say it will take to rebuild their sanitation road, years into planning. For that, the community will continue to navigate a dizzying maze of bureaucracy to seek funding from grant programs spread across multiple federal, state, and tribal agencies – and from a few that are designed specifically to facilitate the unique needs facing Alaska Native communities.
“What we’re looking for are solutions that are designed for us here in the Arctic,” said Golovin Mayor Black as he maneuvered his black pick-up truck over dunes of fresh sand that washed into the village like snowdrifts.
“Right now, some of the relief that’s been offered to us is fine if you live in Florida,” he said. “But we’re not Florida.”
Later that day, Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski landed on Golovin’s airstrip to get a glimpse at the dozens of homes moved from their foundations, including many more like Bobby Amarok’s house whose entire insulation must now be replaced due to diesel fuel and sewage contamination – and all before freeze-up.
“We are actually starting to think more proactively when it comes to how we make our coastal communities more resilient in the face of climate change,” said Murkowski at a town hall meeting in Nome with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, and Representative Mary Peltola. “But for communities like Shishmaref, Shaktoolik or Golovin, that are sitting on ground as flat as this table with no protection around them, is that the safest place for those people?” she asked rhetorically. “Even though their families have been there for generations.”
Back in Amarok’s kitchen where the room’s entire linoleum floor had been stripped revealing nothing but plywood, he and his daughter Lisa laughed at the memories they recalled between one storm season to the next – a drifting boat docked at their doorstep, a disappearing lighthouse – memories captured in time through the family window.
“I know I need to find a safe place to stay up the hill,” said Amarok, acknowledging the ensuing climate crisis. But the thought of relocating anywhere else blew his mind. He wouldn’t even leave his couch when the water began to rise around him. Relatives, including his son, knew when to put his stubbornness to rest when they arrived in deep water to carry him away in the bucket of a front-end loader.
“Where else would I go?” he said, shrugging his shoulders with a laugh. “This is home.”