In a hangar in Bethel, Luke Amik Jr. waited to be evacuated from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
“Everything is lost now,” Amik Jr. said. Around 90% of the structures in Amik Jr.'s home village of Kipnuk have been destroyed.
“All our – all the memories of how it looks and how it looked like, all the houses are gone,” Amik Jr. said. “We can't see Kipnuk the way it was again, and that’s really bad.”
Amik Jr. was one of hundreds of evacuees from the storm-ravaged village of about 700.
“I still can't believe what's happening right now,” Amik Jr. said on Oct. 15. “Can't believe we're getting out of Kipnuk, and it's really hard. It's really bad right now.”
Amik Jr. said that he doesn’t know what the future holds. But his connection to Kipnuk itself — the land, the ocean, the Kugkaktlik River, the hunting and fishing that happen there — is at the forefront of his mind.
“I hope they build another village a little higher, and make our road to the ocean so we can go hunting,” Amik Jr. said with a laugh.
Darrell John, also from Kipnuk, said that the intensity of the storm took him by surprise. He’d gathered wood for his wood stove, filled up the generator, and made sure a portable cooking stove was ready. It all drifted away.
“We're confused,” John said while waiting for an evacuation flight in Bethel. “We don't know where we're going, where we're going to live, or if we’ll ever go back home.”
John said that Kipnuk had been contaminated with fuel, and with sewage from the lagoon and the landfill.
“Everything is gone,” John said. “My boat, snowmachine, my freezer full of Native food we gathered. Our house is in a swamp, swampy area 3 miles away.”
Thirty miles away in Kwigillingok, another village that took the brunt of the storm, Donny Andrew loaded hundreds of pounds of frozen food gathered from the land around him into a four-wheeler and trailer. Helicopters flew overhead.
“Halibut, smelt, berries, salmon,” Andrew said, tossing frozen Ziploc bags into the trailer. “Taking as much as I can; they're gonna store ‘em for us in Bethel.”
Other boxes were full of frozen musk ox, beluga whale, ringed seal and seal oil, salmonberries, and emperor goose.
Andrew had three chest freezers full of subsistence foods that floated away in his shed when the storm hit. He said that he’s luckier than some, whose freezers broke open and ruined their subsistence foods. He donated thawing moose meat and halibut to the school, where it was used to feed evacuees sheltering there.
Lori Trussell is the school principal in Kwigillingok, where the school sheltered nearly 500 people. She’s from Texas and said that she’s no stranger to storms, but this one felt like an earthquake. And grappling with the aftermath is just as hard.
“You see your community, with your memories, with your home, and it's more than a physical home, but it is their food supply for the winter they have worked to get that,” Trussell said. “How are they going to survive? How are they going to get those funds to be able to go forward? It's hard to survive and make a living. And if you're living from the earth, you're picking the berries, you're hunting, you did all that work to provide… it's gone.”
And it’s not just food that has been destroyed.
Community members in Kwigillingok describe whole graveyards of family and ancestors swept away. Near the airport, coffins washed up and broke open near the runway.
Across the Kuskokwim Bay in Quinhagak, residents said that the beach looks like a bomb went off in a museum. Wooden masks, pieces of kayak frames, intricate carvings, and weapon shafts litter the sand. A centuries-old archaeological dig – one of the largest collections of pre-contact Yup’ik artifacts in the world – is devastated.
And the village of Umkumiut – a fish camp integral to Nelson Island summer life – was all but wiped out by the storm.
Many villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta were permanently established after colonial contact – Yup’ik people moved with the seasons, from summer fish camps to winter sod houses. Villages were built around schools and churches, and in low-lying areas where a barge could dock. That means that swaths of these communities are vulnerable to the kind of storm-surge flooding that devastated villages.
Marvin Jimmy evacuated from Kipnuk. He said he hopes to return there and maybe move to the hill that’s near the village.
“That's where they were gonna make [the village] first, but a barge couldn't make it,” Jimmy said. “That's why they moved Kipnuk where it is right now.”
Jimmy said that his life in Kipnuk depends on the foods and land that are there. He can’t really imagine being anywhere else.
Nat Herz in Kwigillingok and Evan Erickson and Eric Stone in Bethel contributed reporting.
This article originally aired as an audio story on NPR’s Weekend Edition on Oct. 19, 2025.
