First came the hurricane-force winds; then came the flooding. When the remnants of Typhoon Halong smashed into Alaska, it devastated the western Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, the tundra set between Nome and the Aleutian Islands. In some remote communities, every single home that wasn’t swept away was damaged by flooding. More than 1,500 people have been displaced, evacuating to towns like Bethel or to Anchorage, 500 miles to the east. Officials warn that many won’t be able to return home this winter, due to the scale of damage and onset of harsh conditions. The storm struck at a particularly vulnerable time, as remote villages face the onset of winter conditions and freeze-up.
The prospect of recovery is further hampered by logistical challenges: Remote and largely roadless, much of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta comprises small, Alaska Native villages reachable only by air or water, making getting supplies for recovery and repair challenging.
Despite the challenges, Team Rubicon has begun disaster response and storm recovery operations in Western Alaska. While the nonprofit has been managing logistics and donations in Anchorage and Bethel, on Friday, October 24, a recon team deployed out of Bethel to evaluate damage in multiple remote villages and identify how volunteers could help. Early next week, the first wave of Team Rubicon volunteers—known as Greyshirts—will begin arriving at the disaster relief nonprofit’s forward operating base in Bethel. Then, they will begin deploying to the identified villages in small strike teams in order to provide storm recovery assistance and critical home repairs for survivors of the storm.
Within those remote villages, Greyshirts will take on any opportunity to make an impact, says Team Rubicon’s Deputy Director of Mission Support, Traci Rankin, whether that’s conducting a typical muck and gut, doing debris removal, or taking on less conventional but still essential repairs.
The expedient home repairs Greyshirts are expected to make at this time may look a little different than on operations in the Lower-48. In many places, for example, critical insulation under houses has been compromised and needs to be replaced. And, while in the Lower-48 homeowners and aid organizations might tear out wet drywall during a muck and gut and then run to Home Depot to replace it, in remote Alaska, those supplies are harder to come by. So, Greyshirts may tear out construction material, dry it, and then reinstall it.
“This is going to be complex. It’s going to be expensive. We understand there are a lot of cultural contexts and complexities,” says Rankin. “We are very acutely aware of the cultural history, and respect the Alaska Native population, and we want to do this in a most respectful way.”
But Greyshirts are expected to respond to Alaska not only in the immediate, but also in the long term.
“In the immediacy, this first phase is just-in-time repairs,” says Rankin of the Typhoon Halong disaster relief operation. “Then, we’ll start to look at what things we can do in phase two, through the winter. We believe there’s work that can be done.”
In the heart of winter, once the region has hard freeze and snowpack and transportation constraints are greater than now with the permafrost, Team Rubicon will start to transition into planning what its work will be in the spring and going into the summer.
For now, though, the goal of the volunteers Team Rubicon is putting into the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta is to do as much repair and recovery work as possible. And to return as many people to livable homes as possible, before winter makes travel to and from hard-hit areas more logistically difficult.
