“It got very cold the day we got there, it got down to like single digits and ice came out of the mountains and rivers and sloughs everywhere,” said Allyn Long, general manager of Alaska Logistics.
The village is losing ground three times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to studies of Napakiak’s erosion. During high tide, the river is only 64 feet from the high-schoolers’ original classroom and gets closer by the day. On windy days, waves crash against the shore where students used to play, battering it until the land relents and crumbles.
Kwigillingok, a community on the Bering Sea coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is used to some flooding during high tides. But in recent years, that flooding has grown more severe, reaching a new threshold last week.
In Chefornak, a family was forced to evacuate their home because a sinkhole caused by thawing permafrost formed underneath it. That family had to move into a building intended to be a quarantine facility.
Storms tore more land away from Napakiak’s already heavily eroded riverbank in early August. About eight feet of bank fell into the Kuskokwim River, adding to the more than 100 feet of shoreline that has already been lost this year.
Winds gusted up to 46 mph and about 2.4 inches of rain fell from Friday to Sunday.
Napakiak doesn’t have a boat landing anymore. Storms over the past week ate huge chunks from the Kuskokwim riverbank close to the city school and fuel
Winds of up to 85 mph ripped up the Southwest Alaska coast on Friday, upending smokehouses, tearing electric lines and flinging a house across the road.
Climate change is thawing the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta’s permafrost, and it’s doing more than cracking foundations, sinking roads and accelerating erosion.
Sinkhole appears along road
Coastal erosion potential threat to community sewage lagoon.
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