Among more than a dozen communities significantly damaged by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, the coastal village of Quinhagak avoided the most severe impacts. But severe erosion has put critical infrastructure in peril and destroyed a vital archaeological lens into the past.
Warren Jones said that he has never seen anything like the remnants of Typhoon Halong.
"It doesn't look like our beach no more. It looks like a bomb hit it," Jones said.
The storm hit the Kuskokwim Bay community of Quinhagak early on Oct. 12. Jones, who heads the local Alaska Native corporation, Qanirtuuq Incorporated, said the shoreline that borders the village was peeled back as much as 60 feet by the storm surge.
"The flooding and the wave action pretty much stripped off the topsoil tundra. So what's left is clay and permafrost," Jones said.
Jones said that water reached the Moravian church in the center of town for the first time in living memory. It temporarily knocked out the community’s water supply line. It also sent boats deep into stands of alders lining the Kanektok River, a vital source of salmon for the community of roughly 800 people.
"There's some gill nets that are hanging on top of the tree stretched out. There's no fish racks, no smokehouses," Jones said.
A half-mile down the coast, the erosion from the storm hit especially hard near the community’s sprawling sewage lagoon.
"The south side corner of the sewage lagoon is right on the bank of the erosion," Jones said.
Drone videos captured by the community after the storm reveal a large chunk taken out of the shoreline just dozens of feet from the 10-acre pool of waste.
"This is raw sewage we're talking about. Yeah, there's no treatment, nothing. It just, sewage gets grinded up and then knocked down to the lagoon," Jones said.
After the erosion brought on by the storm, Jones said that the lagoon may be one storm away from catastrophe. A breach would send raw sewage into the bay, to be carried by the tide up into the mouth of the Kanektok River.
"The whole beach needs to be reinforced by something, rocks or whatever. Maybe make our own concrete boulders. Need [to] start thinking outside the box on this stuff," Jones said.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the potential threat at the lagoon. Across the storm-impacted region, numerous agencies are assessing flood-related environmental contamination on a scale that is still not fully understood.
Several miles further down the coast from Quinhagak, the erosion has laid bare a different story.
"So they're finding masks, all kinds of artifacts right on the beach, on top. So we don't know how much is washed out now," Jones said.
At Nunalleq, the largest known pre-contact Yup’ik archaeological site in Alaska, thousands of artifacts dating back to the 16th century have been scattered across the sand.
"It's like you took our museum and sprinkled it out on the beach," lead archaeologist Rick Knecht said.
Knecht flew to the community to lead the recovery effort.
"What's washing up right now are basically everything people used: weapon shafts, pieces of kayak frames, a complete carved wooden mask, beautiful little carvings, big pieces of bent wood bowls, some complete bent wood bowls," Knecht said.
Knecht said that around 30 to 40 people in the community are assisting with the recovery. He estimates that around a thousand pieces have been saved.
"The main help here is the volunteers from the village that have been out collecting and turning stuff in, a stream of people bringing in totes and boxes full of artifacts that they've saved over the last few days," Knecht said.
The pieces are all headed for a tiny museum in the center of Quinhagak where hundreds of thousands of artifacts collected from the site have already been catalogued and stored.
"Almost everything we know about pre-contact Yup’ik culture comes from that site, and it comes from that material, and it is basically the library of the past," Knecht said. "We're not going to let it go. We're just going to save as much as we can. It's like running into a library or museum that's on fire, and we're just running out with arm loads of what we can save."
Jones, who has been involved with the community-based archaeology project since its inception, said that the erosion eating away at Quinhagak is coming from all sides.
"We're a little bit more elevated, but not for long because we're getting erosion from outside. We're getting it from the coast, [the] river on the north side, it's coming up. And as you see our runway is gone now, so it's coming down from upriver too," Jones said.
The clock is ticking for Quinhagak to not only recover its cultural heritage, but address its immediate infrastructure needs before winter sets in. The community cannot afford to endure another powerful storm, but as Knecht says, “nature bats last.”
