In Kipnuk, Hog River Construction’s headquarters is in a house. The company, which is the current main contractor for home repairs following ex-Typhoon Halong, rents a dozen of the homes they’ve fixed up from locals who remain displaced.
Inside, family photos still line the walls — a birthday, a graduation. They mark snapshots of life that happened here before the storm came and displaced nearly the entire village in part of the largest air evacuation in state history.
Hog River Construction Superintendent Louie Ambrose’s command center desk is the family dining table.
“The owner, he comes in,” Ambrose said. “He's here, staying here for berry picking, but he comes in and sits around, just enjoys his home once in a while.”
Ambrose’s team is close to 100 people, made up of local employees and outside contractors. They’ve worked for months to repair buildings so that if displaced residents want to return, they can.
Last winter, when the ground was still frozen, the team started the slow work of dragging houses that had floated away back to their foundations. They snowmachined lumber from Bethel, over 100 miles away. Without running water in the village, they hauled water from a mountain spring several miles away. Through the summer, they’ve worked to repair exteriors, reinstall Toyo stoves, and begin winterizing homes for another cold season.
“Any of the homes that have people actually in them, we try to make it a priority,” Ambrose said. “So we do have three crews that are just stripping old wet insulation, wet material, swapping out framing, swapping windows in the homes, and those are all for the people that are here that need a place to live.”
A patchwork process
Katherine Keith is the deputy commissioner with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, which organizes the logistics of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) public assistance funding for Kipnuk’s repairs. The response also runs through the Alaska Department of Military and Veteran Affairs with support from the Alaska Department of Labor.
“Right now, the amount of work has substantially subsided as we go into the winter, but we're doing everything we can to remove the wet insulation, and keep lifting the houses off the ground, and shore up the homes for people that are intending to stay there this winter,” Keith said.
The Alaska Department of Transportation estimates that 100 homes in Kipnuk remain to be winterized and ready to be lived in by Thanksgiving. That’s in addition to 50 Association of Village Council Presidents, Regional Housing Authority (AVCP-RHA) homes that suffered minor damage, and more than 30 repaired homes that Hog River Construction says are currently ready to be lived in.
About 20 more homes that drifted away when the waters rose still need to be moved back to their foundations when the ground is frozen and safe enough to traverse, which the Alaska Department of Transportation says will likely occur in January 2027. Seven more homes await demolition.
It’s been a similar situation in the nearby community of Kwigillingok, which was also among the hardest hit by ex-typhoon Halong. The Alaska Department of Transportation said that current rebuild operations have wrapped up until the ground freezes. But many homes remain without plumbing and electrical work, others that drifted away still await relocation, and sections of boardwalk need to be finished.
“There's still a lot of outstanding work in Kwig[illingok], and yeah, I hope as FEMA progresses with the public assistance awards to the tribes that we can expeditiously get that going in January,” Keith said.
But on the ground in Kipnuk, sustained FEMA funding has meant that rebuild efforts have been in all-hands-on-deck mode for months.
Ambrose with Hog River Construction said that phases of the operation have felt like a patchwork. Over the summer, contracts were slated to end, but in what Ambrose described as a scramble, the Alaska Department of Transportation was able to secure funding to extend construction.
“It was tough on the crew because we actually all thought we were leaving,” Ambrose said. “So when you go through that, it takes its hold on you too. Not just mentally, but physically. You get tired from constantly having to overthink everything.”
Now, worker contacts are expected to continue until the remaining 100 homes are winterized. Then, other projects will be picked back up in the new year, though Keith said that it’s difficult to precisely predict.
“We're going to continue to string along what we can, and we're just happy for [the Alaska] Department of Labor and Calista [who have helped support local hires], and looking for those opportunities to keep being creative, to keep things moving,” Keith said. “It’s not very clear cut, and we wish we could forecast more in advance what we'll have, but we're just doing what we can right now with what we have available.”
Back in the village
On a sunny August day in Kipnuk, early 2000s pop music played from portable speakers. Melody Chuckwuk was one of a group of women in yellow construction vests busy around a storm-battered house.
“Right now we're collecting all the wood and putting them in piles,” Chuckwuk explained after throwing a piece of wooden debris into a large pile near the house.
Chuckwuk is one of the local employees. She evacuated from Kipnuk after the storm, but returned this summer to aid in repairs.
“Man, it's the best feeling being at home,” Chuckwuk said. “Just being at home and being able to help clean the village to try [to] bring everyone back.”
That big picture, the hope of restoring Kipnuk to what it was, is also a motivator for Eddie Chuckwuk. He’s been working with Hog River Construction since February, lifting houses off of the marshy ground with air compressors.
“We're working as fast as possible as we can to get like the people back in town,” Eddie said. “That's what I just want to see: for everybody to come back and enjoy where they grew up instead of being placed in a different place or in [a] different area where they're not used to. It's pretty hard.”
It’s been a staggered path over a year to making Kipnuk livable again.
Brice Construction began repair work, fixing damaged village infrastructure and restoring power to the village after the storm. AVCP-RHA homes that suffered minimal damage were repaired earlier in the year by GHEMM Company.
Access to clean water returned seven months after the storm, in May 2026, when the school’s water treatment system was repaired. Over the summer, Kipnuk’s boardwalks were reinstalled, allowing four-wheelers to haul debris and navigate the village with ease. In August, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) ran final tests on a reverse osmosis machine to purify the saltwater-inundated pond that feeds the community washerteria. Now, the few residents living there full time have access to laundry machines and showers again.
Leona Paul works as a cook in the school-turned-mess hall for the construction and cleaning crews. She said that over the summer, Kipnuk started to feel like home again.
“Springtime, it was so — it didn't even look like a village,” Paul explained. “This time I came, I got off the plane and said, ‘Wow, it looks like Kipnuk.' But the only difference is the houses are turned or moved. You can't recognize most of the houses.”
Paul’s own house floated upriver. Understanding the trauma so many in her community now carry, she knows rebuilding won’t bring everyone back.
“Some of the people who live here don't even wanna come here. I think it's too overwhelming for them, especially the older people,” Paul said.
A hazy future
In the wake of ex-typhoon Halong, a fork in the road to Kipnuk’s future became apparent. By law, FEMA funding can only go towards restoring what was damaged to its state before the storm. But the fear of being vulnerable to future weather events has prompted the urgent call to rebuild the village someplace safer.
In March, Kipnuk residents voted overwhelmingly to relocate their community. It’s a process that has taken other communities, like the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta community of Newtok, decades. A year has passed since ex-typhoon Halong, and Kipnuk hasn’t seen much movement on relocation.
Kipnuk resident Raymong Egoak said that with the prospect of building somewhere new being uncertain, it’s about carrying out the funded task in front of the community.
“We keep hearing ‘relocate’, ‘rebuild’, so we stick with rebuild for now,” Egoak said.
Egoak has heard that a lot of families don’t plan to come back, but the goal is for everyone to have the option to return to a house, even just to visit. This past summer, some families displaced to Anchorage and Bethel returned to partake in subsistence and visit their home.
“It feels so good when families come, make us smile again, forget about our hard work, and make relaxes,” Egoak said. “My family came two weeks ago, and I was relaxed and hearing babies cry and holding a baby. They left yesterday and the house got quiet.”
Violet Toyukak moved back to Kipnuk, her home village, just three weeks before ex-typhoon Halong.
“I was planning to move back and had to leave because of that. And because I wasn't here long enough, I wanted to come back and refreshing my mind and body,” Toyukak said.
Toyukak started working on the rebuild in December 2025. She can see how much progress they’ve made.
A shared determination
Construction superintendent Ambrose said that even for newcomers, the recovery efforts have become more than just a job.
“We're all invested in it now. We all want to see the community back to where it was,” Ambrose said. “I don't know. I have a 3-year-old son, and I wouldn't stay away from him this long.”
Ambrose said that the bigger mission is never lost in the daily tasks of clearing debris, stripping drywall, or elevating houses. The people who once lived inside, many of whom are spearheading the labor of the repair, feel close to the work. He said that there’s been a shared sense of determination.
“It's almost like that you could start seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Even though we have still a long way to go,” Ambrose said.
Now, in the home stretch of winterizing residences, Ambrose said that a year of recovery and repair is starting to show.
