Shaktoolik races against time and bureaucracy to rebuild protective berm

On Friday, July 12 Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, announced over $100 million in funds approved to help Alaska communities rebuild infrastructure and public buildings damaged during ex-Typhoon Merbok, which ravaged  Western Alaska and the Norton Sound coast on September 17, 2022.

Amongst the funds listed were $5.9 million for the Native Village of Shaktoolik to repair the community’s berm, which was 28 feet tall before the storm and, while it largely protected the village from extensive damage, the berm was destroyed in just four hours.

Shaktoolik’s Tribal Council called an emergency meeting on Friday, July 12 to discuss the funds and how best to use them to re-build the berm.

The meeting was led by Jolene Paniptchuk, the community coordinator, and Genevieve Rock, the development coordinator.

Rock explained that even though the village had spent two years wading through bureaucratic red-tape to secure the funds, FEMA requested that the tribe spend all the money in the next eight months. After eight months, the tribe is allowed to file an extension, but FEMA recommended against this. She stated the obvious to all that live there: the construction season will only last another three, maybe four months from now.

“We may have only 12 weeks to keep this project going, and that’s something FEMA doesn’t understand,” she said.  

Considering the short window to spend the money, Paniputchuk suggested that they hire two crews instead of one, so they could expediate the process. There was concern that there were enough workers available to fill all of the roles, some of them requiring technical skills such operating heavy equipment.

They debated if they shouldn’t just run 12-hour shifts, six days a week with the current roster of workers.

The council spent time shuffling around the workers in different roles, trying to make the puzzle fit.

The consensus was unanimous that there was no time to waste.

Thankfully, due to another grant secured by Rock, the village had recently acquired several pieces of heavy equipment and a truck, which they are allowed to lease out for the berm project, a critical win for the community as it will mean that the capital will stay within the community.

In the end, they decided to run 12-hour shifts, six days a week with one crew.

The Two-Year Process

Rock sat down with the Nugget to explain the FEMA process that awarded the funds to rebuild the berm.

She began with an allegory: Imagine that there are two islands. There are 20 people on one island and two people on the other island, and everyone needs saving, but you can only go to one island. Which one do you go to?

She agreed that obviously the 20 people should be saved. Yet the moral suffering of leaving the two people was obvious.

“The Federal government is treating our Alaska Native villages as those two people,” she said.

The tribe conducted monthly meetings with FEMA over the last two years since Merbok hit. They were required to engineer plans to rebuild the berm, and complete a cost-basis analysis, both of which are outside the technical resources of the tribe’s own staff. Therefore, they had to hire firms to do the work, disenfranchising the tribe as part of the process. They debated with FEMA over the design of the berm, mostly over using driftwood in it, which the tribe argues they did before and it worked well; FEMA nevertheless insisted on building a berm without wood.

Rock also explained that competitive federal grants required that Alaska Native villages compete against each other for funds. This, she said, goes against the cultural values held by the tribes and their peoples and that such competition is not their way.

She also mentioned that the workload of their tribal coordinator had tripled since dealing with the impact of Merbok and the affiliated paperwork. Rock suggested that Kawerak hire a bookkeeper to work alongside the tribal coordinator to help alleviate the increased workload.
She also had the suggestion that the feds need an Alaskan-based emergency funding agency so that they could tend to the very specific dilemmas that Alaskans face such as, for example, a very short construction and shipping season.

She discussed how frustrating it is that, due to how the Stafford Act — FEMA’s guidelines for declaring disasters — was written that it doesn’t consider “slow-onset disasters” eligible to access funds. This means that climate change induced issues, like erosion, cannot currently access funds.

She said that Shaktoolik had spent 10 years before Merbok being pro-active, building up the berm on their own.

Her life goal, she said, is to see the Stafford Act changed, although she noted it would take an act of Congress to do so.

Whispers of a change

Although no formal bills have been introduced, there was a publication put forth by the Congressional Research Service, a public policy initiative of the U.S. Congress, titled “Climate Change, Slow-Onset Disaster, and Federal Emergency Management Agency” on May 28, 2024.  It says: “FEMA’s process for assessing losses may limit the availability of assistance for slow-onset events.” And recognizes that “Regulation also requires declaration requests be submitted according to deadlines, but a governor or tribal chief executive may struggle to identify the appropriate time to request a Stafford Act declaration for a slow-onset incident.”