Hooper Bay, Alaska — When the wreckage of Typhoon Marbok smashed through the plywood walls of the house she shared with her children and grandchildren, Frida Stone wrote a Bible verse on a small card.
The severe weather that hit the west coast of Alaska on September 16 was the most powerful early-season storm scientists have ever measured. The jet stream has steered it northward from the unusually warm waters east of Japan. During the approach, meteorologists recorded strong hurricane winds and 50-foot swells in the Bering Sea. In this remote village of Yupik, the sea was approaching every time the storm surge crashed.
Stone, 68, put the cards in a sandwich bag, shuffled them and put them out. Using red string, she tied the bag to one of her stilts that supported her home four feet above the ground and asked God for certain mercy.
“I asked him to watch the freezer,” she said.
In rural Alaska, independent freezers are everything. Global warming has wiped out most of the traditional cold storage methods, and Alaska Natives are totally dependent on freezers. Just as climate change seasonally threatens the power systems that power these appliances.
“All these communities that are coastal areas have a lot of their infrastructure vulnerable to flooding,” said Rick Toman, a climate expert with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It’s noticeable at special events,” he said. “If the blackout lasts him four days and the freezer is fully thawed, there is no real or possible mechanism to replace it with food from the land at this time of year.”
Rural homes do not have freezers, and most homes have freezers. A dented Kenmore chest is stacked with hunting gear, an avocado green vintage standing unit, and new Frigidaire Frost Free shoes. By fall, they retain a supply of winter wild food to offset the high cost of air-freighted groceries. supports the economy.
In Hooper Bay, several freezers have been operating with sealed entrances for 20 years, preserving what has been collected over the years. Alaskans call the wild harvest ritual “self-sufficiency.” A typical freezer contains elk ribs, whitefish, herring eggs, chinook salmon, bearded seals, beluga whales, lots of berries, cool whips, pizza rolls, popsicles, and tons of other convenience foods. .
The village sits on the edge of the low-lying delta between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, consisting of treeless tundra and countless lakes. About 1,400 people live here. half are children. Most people speak at least some Yupik. Many of the houses are densely packed, built decades ago, and built by the government with materials and designs unsuitable for the harsh climate. About half have indoor plumbing.
Like most villages in Alaska, the cash economy is weak. The main employers are state governments, federal governments and tribes. At the last census, Hooper Bay had an unemployment rate of 25% and 40% of people lived below the poverty line. No one can live on commercial food alone. Milk, for example, is $16 a gallon, twice his fuel.
“We’d rather pay for gas than food,” said Jan Olson, tribal manager of Hooper Bay Native Village. “You can buy food at the store, but for the same amount of gas you can get fish, birds, elk, and sometimes seals on the way home.”
Toman said there are all signs of more storms like last month’s coming. The region is easily warming three times as fast as he is in the 48 contiguous US states. Even smaller storms will cause more damage than before, he said, because there is less sea ice to calm the oceans and less coastal ice to absorb the waves. said Bill Stamm, chief executive of the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, which operates power plants in 58 small communities.
“It’s going to be an ongoing battle at this point,” he said.
Before electricity came to western villages in the 1960s, people burrowed into the permafrost to cool their food. But over the past 50 years, the region’s average annual temperature has risen by 4 degrees Celsius and is no longer consistently below freezing throughout the year, Toman said. Olson said the day after the storm, the village store sold out of generators to keep the freezer running.
“If the freezer doesn’t work, you have to dry it, ferment it, and salt it,” Olson said. “The younger generation is starting to lose how it should be done. I’m starting to forget too.”
It’s unrealistic to imagine life without a freezer, he said.
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When Merbok drilled last month, eight feet of seawater surged onto the shore and spilled over the sandbag walls of the Hooper Bay power station. It tilted empty tanks and fouled the pipes that fed the town’s main generator. The next morning, when factory workers Leamon Andrew and Leamon Bunyan arrived, the generator tank was low. Many houses had already lost power, but when the tank runs out, the entire village goes dark and the freezer dies.
The pair, cousins, formed a bucket brigade through floodwaters carrying five gallons of diesel at a time to fill their tanks. Finally, they equipped a garden hose. Anyone in the village can tell a story.
“People say to me, ‘I’ve got a year’s worth of food that could go to waste. What should I do?'” Andrew said.
Bernetta Rivers’ freezer only lasted a few days, but she took the plunge and opened it a week after the storm. It was very old and the door was almost rusted but still worked. Inside, a fully feathered duck nestled in a freezer bag containing gray whale meat, near a bag of “mouse food,” the starchy tubers collected from the voles’ burrows. rice field. Ms. Rivers, 52, said she didn’t put everything together on her own. Some things she traded. Others were gifts. She examined a bag of inky berries that had been thawed and refrozen.
“Look, they’re compact now,” she said, deciding to use them anyway.
She thought her village would make akturk, an indigenous soul food that combines berries with sugar, whipped crispo, mashed potatoes, and water. The oldest people in the village, including her parents, had never seen anything like the storm, she said.
“I’ve seen floods before okay,” she said. “But this was one of the windiest, fastest currents she’s ever had.”
Nastasia Urroan, 62, wasn’t as lucky as Rivers. Everything is ruined as flying debris cuts through Meter her box and the freezer has been out of power for her week. While in some places the most valuable possession a person might lose in a storm is a house, in a village a freezer is just as valuable. Ms. Ulroan couldn’t sleep and she was mourning the loss of her ten gallons of berries. This could have been exchanged for cash to fill ATVs and proteins like seals and elk.
“Every day I would come home and cry,” she said.
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The storm has damaged other essential tools of life. At Hooper Bay, about 75 open-top skiffs used for fishing, marine mammal hunting, and traveling to elk hunting grounds were driven one mile inland and deposited in a muddy swamp. Long-standing hunting and fishing camps, which typically consisted of small cabins, clothes racks, nets and other equipment, have all disappeared.
Similar reports were received last week from villages along 1,000 miles of Alaska’s coastline. There have been no casualties, but 35 villages have so far reported moderate to severe damage, said Vivian Cortuis, chief executive of the Association of Village Council Presidents. Electricity was restored, but some freezers were out of service, and the family suffered for years. People also lost their winter hunting snowmobiles, fishing nets, smokehouses, and many boats.
“They are not recreational boats,” she said. “They are ships to provide food for families.”
Representative Mary Peltola, a Yup’ik, grew up with a freezer full of salmon at nearby Bethel. The salmon catch was very low this year and people barely caught any fish. Being a provider is the most important job in rural communities, she said, and wealth is first measured in freezers. I keep having this nightmare. Her son interpreted the dream.
“He said, ‘There are two parts to that nightmare. The first part is cleaning out the freezer, which sucks. All animals given to children must be discarded.
It’s not just calories and money that the freezer holds, she explained, but also the history and culture of Alaska Natives. Pertola says that’s why babies grow teeth from dried fish. “It’s their first food,” she said. “So they learn to love the explosion of oil and the flavor of salmon.”
Ms. Stone and her family reached higher ground, but the water twisted their home from its foundation. But the freezer survived this time too. After the storm, the villagers cut them off from their homes, moved them around town, and attached them to generators.
A few days after the water receded, Stone was busy kneading fried bread dough at a relative’s house. Her home is likely lost, but she believes her own prayers have been answered, and it is customary for hunters to bring food to her elders. Her freezer is full of gifts from the land and community, she said.
“It’s been a way of life for as long as I can remember, a way of life to survive,” she said. “My grandmother, I saw her working on all kinds of animals with my own eyes.”
At the Tribal Administration Building in Hooper Bay, Mr. Olson answered calls about damaged homes and missing boats. His family moved to a shelter because floods pushed their house off its foundation. The wife carried her grandchildren on her back, clung her child to her feet, and sheltered in the rising water.
President Biden recently approved emergency aid to communities, including grants for temporary housing and home repairs, and low-interest loans to cover the loss of uninsured property. But village leaders believe more drastic and permanent measures will be needed.
Olson said the power plant is not a safe place. Arashi convinced him and other village leaders that the entire community needed to move to higher ground. is. The storm caused major damage to his Newtok original site.
“If another storm comes, it’ll just wipe it out,” Olson said.