(The mine spokesperson said that before the mine discharges its wastewater Kivalina residents are taken up in a helicopter to see the state of the ice. Oofta! she captioned her footage. Evacuation routes considered to date by Kivalina and the NAB have included. The need for a concerted effort to mitigate these risks became more evident during an evacuation event in October 2007, when debris-laden storm waves overtopped the barrier island. The road would be designed to accommodate both general purpose and emergency evacuation vehicles over a two-way road with shoulders, multiple turnouts, and safe side slopes that include guard rails or other safety features as required. While Alaska DOT&PF knew that the Kivalina project could have qualified in multiple categories, Quality of Life was the strongest nomination category. As we drove, Willie Nelsons Seven Spanish Angels played on the radio, and Dolly scanned the horizon with her binoculars.
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ti . Project nominations fall into one of three categories: Operations Excellence, Best Use of Technology & Innovation, and Quality of Life/Community Development. Kivalina Coastal Erosion, Kivalina, Alaska. the project from STA 17+50 to STA 18+00 due to ice impact was noted. (Jonathan Hutchinson/Alaska Dept. Snow machines (as snowmobiles are known in Alaska) replaced dogsled teams. It ends at the foot of a large hill, where a newly constructed school forms the heart of the future village. A slide-show presentation, given by a Teck representative named Rachel Wallis, focussed on Tecks past approach to mine closures and reclamation, the process by which the environmental effects of a closed mine are minimized. They told me, We leave the land like it is when we first come in. The doctrine of discovery is a major contributor to the social problems in a lot of Native communities, she continued, using a term that refers broadly to the justifications of colonization. . And this accelerated timeframe resulted in a significantly reduced design and administrative costs. I dont like to talk about this, because it just gets to me, she said. 
This was the port from which the Red Dog Mine, one of the largest producers of zinc concentrate in the world, has shipped millions of tons of processed ore since it opened, in 1989. Evacuation routes considered to date by Kivalina and the NAB have included. In the past two decades, stormwaters have overtopped Kivalina at least once, threatening lives and infrastructure. Millie Hawley, the tribal administrator of the Kivalina IRA Council, keeps track of the many logistics and government agencies involved in relocating Kivalina inland.
Mitchell posts videos on TikTok and Facebook under the name Storm Swan. Summer Caribou, Egg Gathering, Salmon, Arctic Char. After thirty minutes, the village of Kivalina appeared: eighty-odd houses spread across twenty-seven or so acres on the bulbous southern end of a barrier island between the mouths of the Kivalina and the Wulik Rivers. Typhoon Merbok began forming in the central Pacific Ocean during the second week of September. 
WebAlaska DOT&PFs Kivalina Evacuation and School Site Access project keeps the community safe in the face of weather emergencies, while allowing its residents to remain on their native soil. Several material source locations within these areas were evaluated for feasibility based on proximity to potential routes, quantity and
Adams wore a T-shirt with a husky sporting a mining hat from the Red Dog Mine, where she used to work. Every spring, when the ice begins to melt, the mine discharges its wastewater into Red Dog Creek, which flows into the Wulik River, from which, downstream, Kivalina draws its drinking water. PLEASE NOTE: Adobe Acrobat PDF files require a free viewer available directly from Adobe. 
Currently, residents transport their solid waste to a landfill located just over a mile from town.
Then the mine representatives packed up their projector and their collapsible screen and their brochures and caught their plane out of town. Other opportunities for public gathering happen at the school gym, which is open to adults for basketball at night, or at bingo, which happens every night of the week except Sunday and Wednesday. The island, which stretches five and a half miles, is only seven hundred feet wide in most places, and maxes out in altitude at ten feet above sea level. Our project WebPeople of the State of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corp. is a lawsuit filed on October 24, 2018, in the New York Supreme Court.The suit alleges fraud by Exxon Mobil Corporation to mislead the company's investors about management of risks posed by climate change. Like dozens of similarly isolated villages, Kivalina is not accessible to the rest of Alaska by road or connected to a regional electric grid. Swan told me that two of his own children were studying at a public boarding school in Kotzebue, where he hoped they would get a better education than they could in Kivalina. Mitchell is in awe of her sister, whose advocacy, forming connections with activists in the Lower Forty-eight and welcoming journalists who wanted to visit, helped put Kivalinas climate-change story on the map. 
Emma Green discusses a major debate in academia about whether contemporary politics are shaping our understanding of the past too much. It was pretty intense, man, she said. The sea ice used to be twelve feet thick, and there was just one lead. In 2003, the Government Accountability Office reviewed nine Alaskan villages and identified Kivalina as one of four in imminent danger. (Of those four, only one, Newtok, a Yupik village near the Bering Sea, has been able to move some of its residents.) Fuelled by unusually warm waters, the storm system moved north and east toward Alaska, and by the time it crossed the Aleutian Islands weather buoys were recording forty-foot waves and winds of seventy-five miles an hour. In the barrier village of Shaktoolik, Merbok wiped out a protective berm. flooding. The snow-covered playground at Kivalinas new school, which is situated eight miles inland; students began attending it in November. (Before the bridge was built, people had to travel upriver by boat to hunt in the interior.). 2014 Inspection in August finds project to be in good condition. These are plastic pails lined with garbage bags and fitted with toilet lids. by the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, and approved by the community, as a preferred new location for the community school. How should historians respond to the urgency of this current political moment? Batten down the hatches!, For years, Kivalina has been citedlike the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, or the island nation of Tuvalu, in the Pacificas an example of the existential threat posed to low-lying islands by climate change. 2023 Cond Nast. Six hundred million, she said. The acid can change the pH balance of a watershed, causing die-offs of aquatic life and leaching heavy metals from rocks which, in turn, can accumulate in plants and make their way up the food chain. I wanted to file a lawsuit against someone so bad for that land failure, she told me. 
Engineering Manager, ADOT&PF
On September 17th, Merbok, which had been downgraded to an extratropical storm, reached the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Bering Sea inlet of Norton Sound, one of the strongest storms to hit the area in fifty years. On Friday, Janet Mitchell, a village elder and a field reporter for Kivalinas volunteer team of first responders, drove out to the beach on her four-wheeler with her phone. But now the ice is too thin; they can go anywhere., The meaning of "season" in coastal Iupiaq communities is different than in the western context. Were our own tribal community. Recent climate data has indicated that arctic sea ice is forming later in the season, increasing fall and winter storm duration and intensity along the Northwest Arctic coast (Simmonds and Keay 2009; Screen et al. There arent many other places in America that have to deal with questions of relocation right now, Obama wrote, but there will be. He described what was happening in the village as Americas wake-up call.. Kivalina has few social spaces. Tue, Feb 01, 2022. Sources much like newspaper labeled ads, Thus, the search for a new home for Kivalina residents continues. Kivalina is a barrier island off the westernmost coast and residents96 percent of which are Inupiatare feeling the impact of climate change. The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities oversees 237 airports, 9 ferries serving 35 communities along 3,500 marine miles, over 5,600 miles of highway and 839 public facilities throughout the state of Alaska. The selected alternative
Money for the road came from the Northwest Arctic Borough and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. endstream
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<. Swan described the 2004 storm as the impetus for her desire to hold someone responsible for the situation Kivalina finds itself in. I cherish every one of my failures. In 1963, the tribe voted on the issue, and a split vote resulted in the communitys staying on the island. Relocation might ease overcrowding, and the arrival of running water in rural Alaskan homes has been correlated with reductions in respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal infections, but Kivalina has other problems, too. Residents would continue to be exposed to environmental
Hawley is a pragmatic and blunt woman of sixty with glasses and gray hair trimmed in a neat bob. Kateel River Meridian.
direct means of community evacuation to an acceptable mainland location on K-Hill. In fact, one particularly costly effort failed in a large storm just days after its completion, worsening rather than improving erosion. WebAlaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities: Kivalina Evacuation and School Site Project. The road would be designed to accommodate both general purpose and emergency evacuation vehicles over a two-way road with shoulders, multiple turnouts, and safe side slopes that include guard rails or other safety features as required. Dressed in a black T-shirt and sweats, she was seated on a couch beneath a large photograph of her grandfather Clinton Swan, a whaling captain, a member of the tribal council, and a minister in the Episcopal Church, from whom she had inherited the house. People started relaxing when that road was built, because now they have an escape plan, she said. (800) 478-1110 (in AK) within these areas have been determined feasible and are carried forward for further evaluation (K-Hill, Wulik River Channel Source 1, Wulik Relic Chanel
Kivalina, Alaska - Kivalina (kiv-uh-LEE-nuh; Kivalliiq in Iupiaq) is a city and village in Northwest Arctic Borough, Alaska, United States. At the end of the road was the new school, a large building with gray metal siding and accents of lime green and teal, built on piles in order to keep piping above ground and prevent the permafrost underneath from melting. In the face of this increased threat, Kivalina needs a safe and reliable means of evacuation. Why Texass power grid still hasnt been fixed, despite deadly failures. In the picture, the elderly Swan looks dapper in a red lumberjack shirt, suspenders, and nineteen-fifties-style glasses with black-topped rims; in his left hand, he holds a small whales tail carved out of walrus ivory. health, and safety by storm systems predicted to further intensify over time (Brubaker et al. One afternoon, I set off to visit Janet Mitchell at her house, a wooden building in the center of the village. River Source used last, if needed, once the other sites have been exhausted of the needed material. In the film Kivalina: Life in the Modern Arctic, the audience has an intimate look into the lives of the Inupiaq people in the Native Village of Kivalina in Northern Alaska. One wanted to know why the loader that handles the mines ore wasnt covered, to contain hazardous dust. 163 likes. hbbd``b`z$W@ $XA@ (Lightning needs warm air to form.) We were running outside because we didnt know any better, she said. We hugged the shoreline as we flew north above the treeless expanse of the tundra, with its boggy tuffets, its sinkholes and ponds, its snaking rivers, the places where the black soil of the permafrost has crumbled into the sea. catastrophic storm or ocean surge, allowing evacuees to temporarily mobilize to safe refuge at an assembly site on K-Hill. For instance, the group Re-Locate received a $500,000 ArtPlace grant to fund a village-based planning hub for Kivalina, which will be housed in the village's community center.
0002384/State Project No. Route alternatives were evaluated for feasibility Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Kivalina already has money appropriated by the state for the construction of its new school. The act gave Native Alaskans greater self-determination, but it also linked their economic well-being to the commercial exploitation of their lands. The need for a concerted effort to mitigate these Today, Mitchell works as the shareholder-relations cordinator in Kivalina for the NANA Regional Corporation, which is owned by Inupiat shareholders who live or have roots in Northwest Alaska. Accordingly, Kivalina has turned to a locally approved approach of facilitating a safe, reliable, and The government, in mandating the attendance of the regions children, began a project of forced settlement in a place that was seen as precarious from the outset. It costs too much.) A water-stained notice on the wall displayed the liquor ordinance, and the bingo players drank sodas and energy drinks. The nearby Red Dog Mine, which employs some Kivalina residents, is providing funding for the project's reactor, demonstrating how public-private partnerships can help both parties thrive. Have you ever been to British Columbia? Wallis asked. (The mine spokesperson said that leaders from Kivalina are on a subsistence committee that meets regularly with mine representatives to develop procedures and policies designed to minimize potential wildlife impacts.) Five villages have the same climate change issues, some worse than ours. Each year, estimated relocation costs increase, with some estimates for moving the approximately 400 residents ranging from $100 to $400 millionup to a million dollars per person. The proposed road project origin would be at the City of Kivalina, which lies within the Kotzebue Recording District and is located in Section 21, The Kivalina school project needs about $20 million more in funding $9 million from the state and the rest expected from the borough, according to the Alaska
In 2000, the community settled on a nearbyand potentially safersite for relocation, dubbed Kiniktuuraq. Building housing is an expensive and laborious process in the remote Arctic, and no single federal agency is responsible for relocating communities facing environmental threats. Copies of the risk assessment report are also available for review at the DEC Anchorage office at 555 Cordova Street in Anchorage. WebThe Kivalina Evacuation and School Site Access Road project would provide Kivalina residents a safe and reliable evacuation route in the event of a catastrophic storm or A-L. M-Z. Even though their families have been there for generations?, Newtok, the village that has progressed furthest toward relocation, has become as much a warning as a case study. Because of his civic duties, Swan has a white pickup truck. Its completion, in 2021, created a vital evacuation route where once the only possibility of escape was by water or air. In Kivalina, fish are traditionally left to age on the riverbanks for at least several days before being eaten or stored in freezers. Concepts previously studied for their feasibility include construction of an earthen causeway across the lagoon that variously incorporates hydraulic and boat passage options including bridge(s), culvert(s), or both. The liver makes a great breakfast with pancakes, Clinton told me. DOT&PF has been working with the Some impacts of climate change, such as the long-term outlook for the areas permafrost, are still unknown. Stove oil replaced driftwood for heat. catastrophic storm surge. %%EOF (The Western people call them stinky fish, a villager explained to me, but here we call them ambrosia.) If the fish are caught too early in the season, before the frost, they spoil. On November 5, 2013, DEED notified the District that it reduced the project cost to $54,046,749. Where youre walking, it used to be graves, a woman said to me one morning, as I let myself out of the clubhouse. WebNew Schools on the Way. The table below describes traditional subsistence seasons.2. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. . nor fiscally practical in the foreseeable future. The city of Gonzales announced plans to launch a bike lane pilot project on Wednesday. The discussion then turned to the placement of the landfill, in an area known for its salmonberries. The grant amount requested was $100,065442, . Later that afternoon, I was having coffee with Carl Swan, the bingo caller, when Aaron came to the door holding the caribous heart and some ribs, a gift from his first hunting trip. Webdirect means of community evacuation to an acceptable mainland location on K-Hill. Concepts previously studied for their feasibility include construction of an earthen causeway across the lagoon that variously incorporates hydraulic and boat passage options including bridge(s), culvert(s), or both. Numerous study, concept, and planning documents exist on potential solutions, which range from: erosion protection around the city; to relocation It was one of a total of four cars I saw in Kivalina, something that might change now that the village has a road, even if its only eight miles long and ends, for now, at a construction site. quality of material, access constraints, and potential impacts to protected resources (Golder Associates 2013). The plan includes installing high-visibility sidewalks and creating separate The Kivalina school project is the primary benefactor of the bill, though one other project in the state a new school for the Kenai Peninsula Russian Old Believer community of Kachemak Selo will also earn a break under the change. The event resulted in the need for helicopters to carry evacuees off the island, and illustrated that Kivalina currently has no safe method of evacuation in the event of a catastrophic storm surge. The island has no playground, and the BnG, as the club is known, gives kids a warm and informal place to hang out after school. One afternoon, Janet Mitchell asked if I wanted to see the new school site with her youngest brother, Replogle (Reppi) Swan, Sr., who is a whaling captain, the fire chief, and the president of Kivalinas search-and-rescue team.
After visiting the damage in Kivalina, the late U.S. A look back at the Kivalina Evacuation road and bridge project in Western Alaska. The village has also pushed for more local hires, and it is only recently, Hawley told me, that enough people in Kivalina have found steady work at the mine to more than fill a nine-person prop plane. The Northwest Arctic Borough Houses tend to be transferred to family members rather than purchased through the real-estate market. ), Another elder raised his hand and was given the microphone. The Native Village of Kivalina is a federally recognized tribe. Through this program, the Army Corps completed a rock revetment in 2010. The equinox had just passed; the snow that blankets the island for most of the year had not started falling, but the change of seasons was in the air. 2013). Most of the construction funds for the new school came from the state after the settlement of a lawsuit, filed by parents in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in 1997, which claimed that Alaskas method of backing school construction discriminated against rural students. According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliigmiut, were considered their own nation. Discussion turned to allegations by the villagers that the mine was discharging its wastewater too early in spring, before the ice on the river had fully melted, and that the increased flow of water was breaking up the ice and curtailing their ice-fishing season. granted for this printing only. The results of the survey are provided below under the topics of the questions. In the meantime, the community has undertaken measures to buy them some time. Warmer weather also brings heavy snow storms, and these coincide with increasing numbers of visits to the health clinic to treat high anxiety levels and injuries related to snow clearing. Throughout the documentary, the village faces a huge obstacle: climate change. Mitchell, who has gray hair and a friendly demeanor, welcomed me into her living room. Mitchell is one of many village residents who cite as a turning point October, 2004, when forty feet of shoreline eroded during a single storm. They would say things like Were gonna die anyway.. This does not meet the purpose and need of the project. The council members voted in favor of going ahead. An elder at the bingo hall in Kivalina; games are held every night of the week except Sunday and Wednesday. launder billions of dollars in stolen bitcoin, Texass power grid still hasnt been fixed. Because of the climate issue, many of our young people wont experience life as I have lived it. In recent years, Swan has immersed herself in a writing project about what she calls the ancient ways., My dad would hunt with dog teams. ; the vehicles are used by villagers to get around the island. Reppi Swan did a wide loop around the school and continued up the hill, revving past the point where the road petered out to reach a crest, four hundred feet above sea level. Where Janet is open and vivacious, Colleen is more taciturn. I got busted the first time I tried to steal a package off of Jason Batemans porch. The seining had also been delayed. Before that, you could feel the doom and gloom in the village for many years. The route also provides access to a new school under construction and will serve the evacuation site as a full-service community emergency shelter with all-season support capabilities. that could provide for evacuation road construction as well as other infrastructure or general material needs. Women and elders use baited wire to catch crab through ice. "v@|&F2 qY so
D
Some people even want certain kinds of medicines planted there, certain kinds of berries, people might want to open up a campsitetheres a whole range of things that you can do when you close a mine.. 
By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. They mostly kept to themselves, their food brought in from elsewhere. Another resident, Joe Swan, Sr. explains, The ice used to push migrating whales in close.
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It is common in Inupiat families for grandparents to adopt a grandchild to help them around the house as they age. The landscape was golden and strewn with ponds and occasional tracks where Hondas had passed through. The DOT&PF has selected the Southern Route with Lagoon Crossing D as the preferred alternative based on its ability to best meet the projects purpose while
Poor living conditions are a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. One of Millie Hawleys many headaches was finding someone who was willing to get a commercial drivers license to operate them. Kids taking a break on a four-wheel A.T.V. To correspond by text telephone (TDD) (907) 451-2363. The 33,437-square-foot Kivalina School was a $50.5 million project that replaced the former K-12 school. When people start talking about climate change, it really scares me, laments Russel Adams, Sr., a lifelong resident of Kivalina. Through its Department of Community and Regional Affairs, the State of Alaska currently assists the community with a relocation coordinator to further interagency efforts to finalize this or another relocation solution. NAB within the Study Area (Community Proposed Alternatives). Catch fish and trout with beach seine nets. 
The Climate Foundationwinner of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" grantwill work with Kivalina leaders and Re-Locate, a group of social artists formed to help with Kivalina's relocation efforts, to apply its success at developing innovative waste management technology around the world to benefit Kivalina and other Arctic communities. A wide array of habitats were depicted in their camouflage outerwear: winter birches, spruce forests, marshy rushes. Someone asked when it was taken; she couldnt recall the last time she had seen a herd that big in the area. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. In the school gym, under the banners of the Northwest Arctic Borough athletic league (Kivalinas mascot is the qavvik, or wolverine), the villagers, who ranged from toddlers to the very old, sat on bleachers. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil. The fall had been warm, and the thin layer of ice known in Inupiat as qinu, which used to begin forming over the lagoon in late August, had not yet appeared by the last week of September. To revamp the village sanitation system, a biochar sanitation system is being designed to turn human and solid waste into sustainable energy. Beaversan invasive species in this regionbuild dams that make river travel to upstream food sources challenging for residents. Building on permafrost requires gravel pads that protect the ice from melting, and aboveground pipes. -.jpg)
See links to these resources in the sidebar, under Additional Resources. They always waited for qinu.. WebThe Kivalina Strategic Management Plan Community Participation and Input Report Phase II, describes the final phase of community participation and input. Several beach protection measures have been tested over the past decade, but all have failed. This site is also identified by the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, and approved by the community, as a preferred new location for the community school. The Southern Route is 7.7 miles long and would begin
Kivalina v. ExxonMobil The court dismissed the lawsuit, citing, among other reasons, the difficulty of holding companies responsible when virtually everyone on Earth is responsible on some level for contributing to such emissions. The lawsuit also alleged that the companies had conspired to mislead the public about the impact of fossil fuels. 756 0 obj
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jonathan.hutchinson@alaska.gov
These community initiated route concepts were refined and a fourth route was developed
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