![]() ![]() The fish camps peppering the river mouths and shores of the southern Seward Peninsula are more like cozy shacks, neither electrified nor plumbed, buttressed by meat racks, smokehouses, saunas, cutting tables, woodpiles and utilitarian bric-a-brac for making use of the land and sea’s seasonal offerings.įamily camps and subsistence cabins lie in ruins, shifted off their pads, floated away, and buried in sand along the Nome-Council Road. To those unfamiliar with Western Alaska, the word “cabin” might conjure a hut of neatly notched logs nestled in the woods, or a euphemism for a lavish weekend home overlooking Nancy Lake. Many car and truck owners are gradually discovering their vehicles were effectively totaled by partial submersion in the salty, silty floodwaters.īut the worst damage is out of town, with an as-yet-uncounted number of subsistence cabins in shambles. By Monday, business owners were unboarding windows along Front Street and shoveling muck out of gutters as heavy equipment rumbled around side streets and the seawall. Nome, a city of about 3,700 people that functions as the commercial and logistical hub for 15 smaller communities in the Bering Strait region, weathered the worst storm in decades relatively well. “Some of them just disappeared,” said Bryant Hammond, the incident commander for Nome’s emergency operation center. There was no loss of life, but the landscape of Nome is physically altered for the foreseeable future, with raw material scattered wildly, the coastline reconfigured, the camps and shore-side compounds anchoring generations of subsistence either flattened or gone.Īll up and down the Nome-Council Road heading east out of town, cabins used for fishing, foraging and seasonal family life are in ruin. NOME - The storm that slammed Western Alaska over the weekend has reorganized the land. This debris is by the mouth of the Nome River along the Nome-Council Road. ![]() Some people were looking for possessions that washed away, including cabins and outbuildings that were moved or shifted. The storm left trash and debris along the coast in places where the ocean surged and rivers topped banks. Updated: SeptemPublished: September 20, 2022 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |