Village of Golovin still accounting for all that’s been lost in storm
WESTERN ALASKA
Anchorage Daily News
GOLOVIN — Nothing looks quite right in the low part of Golovin. Not the homes, not the land or roads, and not the water still pooled up like brackish ponds in people’s yards. When the floodwaters finally receded from last weekend’s powerful storm, it left this village of 150 choked by debris: mud and muck mixed with spilled diesel and sewage, driftwood and stumps, building material stripped off homes by the wind or dashed to pieces by days of pounding waves. And sand.
Sand is now everywhere. Sand shorn from the coastline and redeposited in the worst of places: inside houses, burying outbuildings, choking the engines of idled snowmachines and four-wheelers buried to their
handlebars. Sand drifted everywhere like blizzard snow that will never in a million years melt.
Even in the best of cases, things won’t be fixed back up for a long time.
Golovin was hurt more than any other place in the region by the remnants of typhoon Merbok as it swirled up through Bering Sea. Houses moved hundreds of feet from their perches. Subsistence equipment disappeared or was destroyed. Shipping containers, boats and old fuel tanks were jostled around and remain stuck where they shouldn’t be, tipped at odd angles. Family camps and cabins were obliterated.
Of Golovin’s 64 homes, 22 were badly damaged, seven of them likely not salvageable, according to a local damage assessment last week. Others that endured structurally are ruined on the inside, with every meaningful possession contaminated by floodwater.
“It’s not livable right now,” said Celeste Menadelook, describing her family’s home.
A new mother, Manadelook and her husband are sleeping in her small office at the town’s tribal building with their 4-month-old daughter while their house is torn down to the studs, its flooring, insulation and drywall ripped out and hauled to the dump. Gone too are items that can’t be replaced, from a laptop full of family photos to handmade fur hats and mitts for winter.
“My parki that my aana made. Things that were passed down. Our appliances. Everything has to go. Our washer, dryer, refrigerator, our bedding, our cabinets, our couches. Everything has to go because it smells like sewer in the house,” Manadelook said.
Supplies are flowing to Golovin in an effort to help. Charity is pouring in. Manadelook soothed her infant Wednesday beside folding tables laden with donations that kept arriving throughout the day.
In the days and weeks ahead, charity and relief will keep arriving to Golovin and other Western Alaska communities contending with widespread wreckage. While that aid blunts some of the immediate hardship, it is no replacement for all that is lost, residents say. Especially with the clock ticking on winter’s arrival.
‘Other people care’
Donny Olson, state senator for the region and Golovin resident, looked like he’d been on the losing end of a bar fight, sporting a gnarly black eye as he rushed around repairing electrical wiring in the airplane hangar attached to his house.
“What happened was this,” Olson said, standing by a doorway in his home, the first floor of which had been thoroughly buried under sand.
As he raced to protect the house from the storm surge’s rising water, he darted outside, timing his sprint to evade the rolling waves.
“I withstood the wave, but I wasn’t ready for the back,” Olson said. “When it hit the wall it came right back on me and threw me into one of these four-by-fours.”
Somehow, he still managed to get four young children evacuated from the property and up the hill to the tribal building as the storm water rose. It was one of several dramatic rescues, including an elder who was moved out of his home to safety in the bucket of a front-end loader.
The cleanup work at the Olson house, like many, is immense. Eight volunteers came by to help shovel out all the sand. With the school closed for a week during recovery, local teachers were chipping in like a roving labor corps, with work crews sent in by the school district to repair teacher housing, which was also damaged. Olson and his wife, Willow, got a hand piling up all the saturated possessions from their first floor out in the airplane hangar, and were waiting to see what could maybe be saved.
“The city has opened the washeteria for use, so I’m gonna start hauling stuff over there,” Willow said. She estimated they had about 50 loads worth, though most of it is probably a lost cause.
Willow Olson was one of the many Bush residents who shared dramatic photos of the storm and its havoc to social media in real time when there was power and network coverage to do so. The images helped draw attention from all over the state and beyond to just how intense the storm was. And in its aftermath that awareness, according to Olson, has helped conjure an array of support, from messages of solidarity to tangibles like food, supplies, labor.
“That has helped because it lets me know that other people care. They’re listening and they’re trying to respond in whatever way possible,” she said.
By midweek, those contributions were accumulating and more manpower was materializing.
Inside the tribal hall was a running list on a whiteboard of who had sent food and goods, organizations like the Bering Strait School District and Ryan Air, alongside the partial names of charitable individuals: “Anahma,” “Barb A,” “Delaney J,” “Kenai Guy.” There were big boxes full of pre-assembled sandwiches sent by the World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that decamped to Nome after the storm subsided. Cases of shelf-stable staples like breakfast cereal, cans of tuna, mac and cheese, granola bars, and canned soup were piled beside lumpy sacks of oranges, apples, and several cantaloupes donated by a mining company in the region. An unknown donor had left two jars of silver salmon and a can of seal oil by the back door. Hot bowls of spaghetti and moose soup were consumed, the coffee pot never empty.
Community members were breaking down the piles and reassembling them into boxes for families to take home. More supplies like bottled water and clothing were accumulating in the sanctuary of the Covenant Church in the lower part of town.
‘This house don’t belong here’
The state sent 130 personnel out to Nome and Bethel to assist with recovery, members of the Alaska National Guard and other quasi-military units working as a joint task force under the banner of Operation Merbok Response would disperse from the hubs to impacted villages. Three members of the Alaska State Defense Force were camped out in the tribal hall asking Golovin Mayor Charlie Brown what kinds of supplies and manpower would be the biggest help, and promising to send out good workers with “strong backs, weak minds” who could take orders on the grunt work ahead without giving sass or unwanted creative input.
Brown was highly sought after Wednesday, peppered with questions and requests by visitors. Members of the Red Cross asked him to show them damaged homes so they could begin making assessments. A man from Bering Straits Native Corp. requested a tour of town to find out what building materials people most need. By Thursday, the corporation had managed to ship out a whole box truck filled with 10,000 pounds of essential supplies: generators, shop vacs, Tyvek suits and gloves. A small team from Norton Sound Health Corp. came in on a chartered plane from Nome with 40 pizzas, and listened to residents describe the conditions of their property before dispensing advice for disinfecting what might be saved.
“I’m at a loss for words,” said Norton Sound Health Corp. head Angie Gorn. “It’s hard to know what to say.”
A sturdily built man with a calm demeanor, Brown showed the Red Cross team a dilapidated home that a young man had recently begun trying to fix up and make habitable. It had floated 200 feet from its parcel.
“This house don’t belong here,” Brown said.
Another small house was unmoored and came to rest in the middle of an intersection, prompting four-wheelers and trucks to circumvent it like a poorly planned roundabout.
The day was chilly, and Brown told the visitors most of the heaters used to warm homes are completely shot.
“There’s a lotta those that need to be replaced,” he said.
Down by the shore, the storm waves tore deep gashes into the land, chewing open the protective banks that buffer homes from the sea. Shreds of fishing nets tangled up in tree stumps like seaweed. All along the coastline were big smooth stones churned out of the seafloor and sprinkled on a beach that now extends much farther into town than it used to.
In spite of all that’s happened, no one in Golovin mentioned leaving. There was no talk of pulling up stakes and moving to Nome or Anchorage. Everyone talked about what will come next as a process of restoration, not departure or abandon.
‘It came in pretty fast’
Jack Brown is the oldest man in Golovin. He’s seen the country change in his nearly 80 years, remembers that in 1955 “the first moose was caught. Now they’re everywhere.”
But the storm that slammed into the west coast of Alaska last week was without an equal — at least not in living memory here.
“They were never this bad. We never had storms here in the ‘50s,” Brown said, stroking his white billy-goat’s beard and glancing out the window toward the surf.
