The Dillingham shoreline is creeping closer to our city than most citizens are aware of. Locations at risk include the Kanakanak sewage lagoon, the local hospital, graves from the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic, and a number of residential houses.
Mike Davis lives in one of those houses. He says he built it with erosion in mind, but was not prepared for it to move along so rapidly — at least, not during his lifetime.
“Right now we have probably a couple years on our leach field,” Davis said. “But at some point, that bluff will be at our doorstep, literally.”
Davis has tracked the shoreline erosion for years now, and says it’s accelerating.
“It's advanced a lot, two to three feet a year,” said Davis. “But now multiply that probably by double in some places.”
And Davis is not alone. Other citizens in Dillingham are also up against the unbeatable tide, unprepared for the future.
The Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab has been tracking this erosion — along with other communities in the Chignik and Bristol Bay regions — for over a decade. Their project is called Stakes for Stakeholders, led by Chris Maio, a professor in geoscience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His team has collected data through aerial imagery and on-site surveying to track erosion and help communities plan for the future. Maio says the problem is much more complex than waves hitting the beach.
“There's a mix of what could be considered natural erosion of a river system, kind of moving back and forth in a streambed,” Maio said, “to more climate-driven factors such as increasing precipitation and decreasing sea ice.”
Sea ice is a natural sea wall. So less sea ice means more time for waves to wear down the Kanakanak bluffs. Maio says water from inland is eroding the bluffs as well.
“An increased amount of precipitation during the winter and spring puts a lot more water on the ground surface that then is going to seep down and travel through that exposed bluff and basically erode sediments out,” he said.
Reyce Bogardus is working on his doctorate degree at the Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab and has been working with Maio on this project for about a decade. He says that what the bluffs are made of also contributes to their swift deterioration.
“A lot of the bluffs are just glacial outwash sediments, so very silty, very easy to move,” Bogardus said. “Even just the wind I've noticed there is really contributing to the destabilization of the bluffs.”
This summer, Bogardus surveyed the beaches and collected data in Dillingham. He says this year revealed some of the most apparent erosion he’s ever seen.
“The overarching word that everyone was using is ‘catastrophic’ this year,” he said. “I didn't see a single stretch of coastline that didn't look very obviously eroding.”
The two scientists say this impacts the fishing community, too. As the sediment moves, it alters the grounds where fishermen put out their nets.
“It's going into the watershed. It's going into the river,” Maio said. “It's creating bars where the bars didn't used to exist, and that's impacting all the fishermen out there and their navigation and where they set their nets and everything.”
Maio says not much can realistically be done.
“That's like hundreds of millions of dollars to do a seawall there,” Maio noted. “In those cases where it's residential houses that are threatened, there really isn't much that could be done other than a managed retreat moving inland.”
With all the houses and infrastructure at risk, Maio says that it’s high time for the community to reconvene and plan for the future.
“I think that this year really kind of hit home that this is not something that is going to be for the younger folks to handle,” said Maio. “It's for everyone to handle right now.”
And Davis will have to handle the problem by relocating his house.
“We did build it to eventually move it at some point,” Davis said. “But we're going to have to be moving it sooner than we thought.”
As for what the rest of Dillingham will do, that remains to be seen.
