This week, leaders from communities across the lower Yukon River coast are gathered in Bethel to bolster disaster preparedness and recovery strategies. The Rural Resilience Workshop is a three-day event put on through a partnership between the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and the regional tribal consortium the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP).
Richard Hildreth is the program manager for emergency planning at the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. He works with the hazard resilience team, which is the group conducting the workshop. He said that the workshops first began in 2017 in Bethel and have since been replicated in communities across the state.
“And this is now coming back to revisit Bethel and to bring the workshop back,” Hildreth said. “But this one, we wanted to ensure that we focused on how [Typhoon] Merbok transpired, and that was why we built the agenda the way it exists.”
Tribal, municipal, and safety representatives are in town representing 13 communities: Alakanuk, Emmonak, Chevak, Hooper Bay, Kotlik, Pitka's Point, Marshall, Nunam Iqua, Pilot Station, Russian Mission, St. Mary’s, Mountain Village and Scammon Bay.
Typhoon Merbok impacted each of the 13 lower Yukon communities in attendance. With the help of specialized speakers — including representatives from the National Weather Service and the United States Coast Guard — the workshop will break down the disaster process, looking at Typhoon Merbok’s impacts, village response, and the process of recovery.
Hildreth said that the aim of the workshop is to bring these groups into conversation with each other about what worked and what could be improved.
“Most of our communities, there's largely three major entities: the tribe, the city, if the city exists, or corporation, and they all have different requirements or different demands upon them, but they need to work together to ensure that they're helping their community,” Hildreth said. “We just want them to work together to help the community forward as a holistic unit.”
But the levels of collaboration extend beyond the networks between villages. As AVCP Chief Executive Officer Vivian Anginran Korthuis said in the workshop’s opening remarks, it’s about making sure disaster communication goes up the chain of command.
“We know the landscape, the oceanscape, the rivers, and the mountains. We live here, and we are not going anywhere,” Korthuis said at the podium of the Yupiit Piciryarait Cultural Center in Bethel. “Both the federal and state governments need to recognize this. This work session can be the first step in that process.”
Hildreth said that AVCP requested the workshop include village public safety officers as well as tribal police officers and village police officers, who were critical to the disaster recovery process across the affected Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta communities. The partnership coordinated a parallel workshop run by representatives from Louisiana State University, who are holding a separate training for law enforcement.
The workshop will help the lower Yukon communities refine their local emergency response plan, a step-by-step binder designed to walk communities through the first 72 hours of a crisis.
“All disasters are managed locally as best they can, locally, until it exceeds their capacity,” said Hildreth. “Then they start making calls for support from either local agencies around the Y-K region, AVCP, [the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation], or others. And then again, it goes out to the state.”
The workshop will also touch on recovery funding and feature a table-top simulation of Typhoon Merbok, in which communities will role play their preparedness with real answers from their protocol.
Hildreth said that the partnership plans to hold two more Bethel workshops in 2025 in order to reach as many of the coastal communities in the region as it can. The next workshop is scheduled for this fall.
