ANCHORAGE, United States — Residents in towns and villages on
Alaska’s
western coast were beginning Sunday to assess the damage from one of the most
powerful storms to hit the region in decades.
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The vast remains
of Typhoon Merbok battered coastal towns as it rumbled northward, and by Sunday
morning it had largely moved into the Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Strait.
But coastal
towns in that northern region remained under flood warnings Sunday, the
National Weather Service (NWS) Fairbanks office tweeted.
The storm has hammered a vast stretch of Alaska’s
coastline, bringing powerful winds, tidal surges and what the NWS described as
“angry seas,” with waves of 15m or more.
Governor Mike
Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration.
Because of the
remoteness of many coastal villages, and with communications limited, a full
picture of the damage is expected to emerge slowly.
But officials
and residents said the destruction was severe.
“So many
communities I have visited, from Bethel, Unalakleet, Quinahgak, Hooper Bay, and
up to Nome and Teller, have been inundated by the storm,” Lisa Murkowski, one
of Alaska’s US senators, tweeted Sunday. “I am heartsick at the devastation.”
The state
Emergency Operations Center said it had received “reports from multiple communities
of power disruptions, damaged homes, ... flooding, and infrastructure damage,”
but no reports of injuries.
Low-lying
coastal areas were hardest hit, according to meteorologists and local news
reports, with schools and airports flooded and some roads washed away.
One small town —
Golovin, on the Norton Sound — saw houses float away. “We’ve had flooding in
the past a few times, but it was never this severe,” Clarabelle Lewis, a tribal
official with the Chinik Eskimo Community, told the Anchorage Daily News.
“We’ve never had homes moved from their foundations.”
In Shaktoolik, a
village of some 220 people on a gravelly spit between the Tagoomenik River and
Norton Sound, Mayor Lars Sookiayak said that a berm built to protect the town
from the sea had been wiped out.
“We’re almost becoming
an island,” he told Alaska Public Media News.
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