ANCHORAGE, Alaska — More than half the residents of an isolated Arctic village were evacuated as storm surges threatened to flood their slender barrier island Thursday, the latest chapter in their losing battle against the sea.
With no road system within hundreds of miles of Kivalina, about 100 people, mostly seniors and children, boarded small propeller planes to the regional hub city of Kotzebue. More than 100 others embarked on a grueling 70-mile nighttime journey by boat, all-terrain vehicle and bus to shelter at the mountain headquarters of a zinc mine.
The National Weather Service predicted storm surges Thursday afternoon as the tide rises and winds strengthen to 25 to 40 mph, said John Dragomir, a meteorologist in Fairbanks. A flood warning is in effect through Friday morning, he said.
Most of the nearly 400 residents of Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo village in northwest Alaska, rely on fishing and hunting.
It was the only inhabited area under the flood warning along the Chukchi Sea, but is one of three villages along Alaska’s storm-battered western coast that probably will have to be moved within the next 10 to 15 years because of erosion, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps said in a report last year that it would cost up to $355 million to move Kivalina, Newtok and Shishmaref.
Kivalina, 625 miles northwest of Anchorage and 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, has lost about 100 feet of coastline in the past three years to waves and storm surges, said tribal administrator Colleen Swan.
A $3 million sea wall built and rebuilt to protect Kivalina’s roughly 600-foot-wide island is not keeping the water at bay, Swan and other villager leaders said.
“The people have lost their peace of mind,” Swan said. “Since the village started eroding, we have lost a lot of land and people have become fearful of the fall storms.”
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