After last year’s storm, this isolated Alaska town continues to pick up the pieces: NPR
Construction crews work on homes and other buildings in Kipnuk after former Typhoon Halong hit the Alaska coast in October 2025.
Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
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Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
Last fallthe remains of Typhoon Halong devastated many small Alaska Native villages off the highway system in western Alaska. The storm destroyed infrastructure, floated homes from their foundations and displaced more than a thousand people. A year later, hundreds remain displaced as slow repair work continues in a remote part of the state. And in one of the hardest-hit communities – the small town of Kipnuk – people still don’t know when they will leave again.
“Work as quickly as possible”
The village of under 200 housing units is located on the wide open tundra and is only accessible by air.
A year ago, 90% of residences were damaged by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, according to the Alaska State Emergency Operations Center. Dozens of people were swept from their foundations, some with families still inside. The community is now widely dispersed across Alaska – some outside the region their ancestors have lived in for thousands of years.
Kipnuk, 10 months after former Typhoon Halong hit the coast of Alaska in October 2025.
Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
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Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
Throughout the past year, crews have worked on the repairs.
On a clear day in August, Eddie Chuckwuk’s construction crew attempted what seemed like magic: lifting a building onto its foundation using air compressors.
Chuckwuk is one of dozens of people who have worked long days to rebuild the place where he grew up.
“We’re working as fast as we can to get people back into town,” Chuckwuk says. “That’s what I just want to see: for everyone to come back and enjoy the place they grew up instead of being put in a different place…where they’re not used to. It’s quite hard.”
Workers help clear debris from the tundra around Kipnuk and construction crews work on homes, 10 months after former Typhoon Halong hit the Alaska coast in October 2025.
Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
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Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
Challenges remain to go back
This work is essential to making Kipnuk’s homes fit for living again, but the town is far from fully restored.
Most Kipnuk residents did not have home or flood insurance, according to the state. They estimate that Federal Emergency Management Agency funds will make most homes habitable by Thanksgiving, and that means replacing damp insulation and repairing windows, doors and roofs. But the funds won’t be enough to return some severely damaged homes to the condition they were in before the storm. The State is currently appealing to secure additional funds to build replacement housing.
There is also no estimate for when the school will reopen.
Leona Paul, who works as a cook to feed construction crews, says that even though the homes are habitable, some people were too traumatized by the storm to return.
“I think it’s too painful for them,” she says, “especially for the elderly.”
And climate change means towns like Kipnuk more vulnerable to future storms. Most people in town I want to rebuild the village a safer place, but the funding they have received so far from FEMA can only be used to restore what was damaged. Kipnuk hasn’t found the money to move yet.
In August, damage from the October 2025 storm was still visible in Kipnuk.
Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
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Gabby Hiestand Salgado/KYUK
Living away from home has harmful consequences
Right now, residents may have no better option than to move. Many say living in big cities, or cities like Anchorage, has been difficult. People speak less Yugtun – the mother tongue. They are further away from their loved ones. Their children, used to playing all over the city, have to watch out for cars.
Leona Paul, who spent part of the summer at Kipnuk, says she loves being there. “You are free to do whatever you want,” she says. “In a city, you can’t do what you want.”
Being displaced from the village also meant separation from Alaska Native cultural practices of hunting and gathering traditional foods on the land.
Some residents, like Burt Paul’s family, would return home during the summer to live and be together.
Upstream from Kipnuk, on a lush tundra cliff, his family filled buckets with sweet, orange salmon berries, or naunraqs as they are called in coastal Yugtun. He said after last fall’s destruction, he didn’t know when he would see these native plants grow back.
“It boggles my mind to see food growing, grass growing, fish coming in,” he says.
Burt Paul’s family returned home for the summer to live and be together. On August 12, 2026, they went to pick berries up the river from Kipnuk.
Samantha Watson/KYUK
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Samantha Watson/KYUK
Paul’s family was evacuated after the storm, but he remained in Kipnuk, acting as a community leader during the period that followed. Usually her family goes camping and picking berries for days. This summer, their trips were shorter – limited to times when everyone was in town.
As short as these trips were, he says they were important: “We have to make things happen somehow, whatever situation we are going through,” he says.
He doesn’t know when his family – or his village – will be reunited again.
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