[image: Anchorage Daily News] <http://www.adn.com/>
*Fierce fall storm pounds Kivalina*
*SEAWALL NOT TRUSTED: Fewer than 50 residents remain on island.*
[image: adn.com story photo]
The Coast Guard is monitoring fuel facilities in Kivalina near the Red Dog
Mine on the Chukchi Sea, about 80 miles northwest of Kotzebue. On Sept. 13,
2007, fall storms were eroding the shoreline, creating the potential for an
oil spill from the Alaska Village Electrical Cooperative tank farm. *(Photo
courtesy of Rural Alaska Fuel Services)*
------------------------------

[image: adn.com story photo]
The Coast Guard is monitoring fuel facilities in Kivalina near the Red Dog
Mine on the Chukchi Sea, about 80 miles northwest of Kotzebue. On Sept. 13,
2007, fall storms were eroding the shoreline, creating the potential for an
oil spill from the Alaska Village Electrical Cooperative tank farm. *(Photo
courtesy of Rural Alaska Fuel Services)*
------------------------------

[image: adn.com story photo]
*( )*
------------------------------


By BETH BRAGG
bbragg@...

*(Published: September 14, 2007)*

The northwest coastal village of Kivalina was largely empty Thursday as
wind, rain and crashing waves chased away most residents and raised fears
that a year-old, multimillion-dollar sea wall wouldn't keep the Chukchi Sea
at bay.

Fewer than 50 of the town's 330 people were left in the Inupiat community,
most of them men working round the clock with heavy equipment to add
3,600-pound sandbags to the faulty seawall.

"The weather has turned for the worst," Mayor Austin Swan said Thursday
afternoon as the storm built.

Weary from a night-long evacuation, Swan looked out his office window and
said he could see whitecaps on the village lagoon -- a sure sign that wind
gusts reaching 50 mph had found land.

Late afternoon brought more concern as winds switched from the southeast to
the south, meaning they were coming right off the ocean. "They will
definitely be pushing straight onto the beach," Swan said.

Sustained winds of 30 mph continued through the night.

With most villagers safely away -- 132 found shelter at the Red Dog Mine,
about 117 flew to Kotzebue and 18 boated to inland fishing and hunting camps
-- the biggest fear was whether the seawall would do its job.

A whole row of sandbags was lost to the Chukchi late Wednesday night, Swan
said, and the supply of those being used to fortify the wall was dwindling.
Only about 100 sacks were left, he said, although more were on the way from
Alaska Interstate Construction of Anchorage, which rounded up more than 400,
and the Army Corps of Engineers, which planned to send several hundred.

Kivalina has lost more than 100 feet of coastline in the past three years to
waves and storm surges. Construction of a 1,800-foot seawall was completed
last year for $3 million, but villagers said it has failed to protect the
town.

An official with the Northwest Arctic Borough did not return phone calls
Thursday seeking information about the design and construction of the wall.

A couple of months ago, the town declared the wall a safety hazard.

"It was a total failure from day one," said tribal administrator Colleen
Swan, the mayor's niece. "On the day there was to be a celebration of the
completion of the seawall last year, we got hit with a minor storm and it
was damaged immediately."

And so under a dimming sky Wednesday night, villagers fled the narrow
barrier reef island.

Ninety-eight of them, mostly elders and children, boarded small charter
planes bound for Kotzebue, said Suzy Erlich, spokeswoman for the Northwest
Arctic Borough.

Another 75 boarded small boats for a precarious nighttime channel crossing
to the Alaska mainland. Once there, they loaded onto four-wheelers for a
bumpy ride across 17 miles of tundra to the port of the Red Dog Mine, where
a bus shuttled them another 50 miles to a gymnasium at the mine's
headquarters.

"You have to bring people across the channel in the dark. There are people
with babies and it's windy. The water is rough," Swan said. "I don't know
how the people handled it."

On Thursday morning, 55 more made the trip to Red Dog, bringing the total
there to 130, according to Jim Kulas, the mine's environmental
superintendent.

About a hundred of them slept in spare camp beds and the rest bunked down in
the gym. Though the mine has plenty of room and food, the Alaska Commercial
Co. answered a call for diapers and baby formula.

People continued to leave Thursday. City administrator Janet Mitchell said
the last plane left at 5 p.m., leaving 46 people in the village, including
teachers and school staff.

Tom Hanifan, a former principal and teacher, said only two of the school's
100 students were in class Thursday. "They're getting good, intensive
one-on-one," he joked.

Hanifan, a resident for 30 years, said he stayed because he doesn't think
the village is in danger.

"It's no big deal," he said Thursday. "I checked the Fairbanks weather
office and pulled down the weather maps and couldn't see anything that was a
problem. Darned if I was gonna panic."

Swan said her six children and one grandchild escaped to the mine while she
stayed behind to help monitor the storm. This is just the beginning of the
fall storm season, she said, and no one will be surprised if there are more
evacuations to come.

"The people have lost their peace of mind," she said. "Since the village
started eroding, we have lost a lot of land and people have become fearful
of the fall storms every year."

The seawall's inadequacy adds to the unease.

"It started failing immediately," Hanifan said. "The first storm, water
washed underneath it."

Villagers said the wall is steep instead of sloped, so waves batter it
directly instead of washing up and away. Crews on Thursday tried to create a
slope with the heavy sandbags.

"We've spent a lot of money on it," the mayor said, guessing that as much
has been spent trying to fix the wall as was spent to build it. "It's been a
lot of trouble."

He said those who remain in Kivalina will stay unless the wall gives way
completely. "We're gonna try to hang in there till the very last," he said.

But he said he's grateful to his son who, before evacuating on Wednesday
night, gassed up Swan's motorboat.

------------------------------

Contact Daily News reporter Beth Bragg at bbragg@.... The Associated
Press contributed to this report.





*Copyright (c) 2007 **The Anchorage Daily News
(www.adn.com)*<http://www.adn.com/>





--
Check out my online scanner feed at mms://streamwebtown.com/northslocounty
Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/californiadisasters/
Check out my Myspace Profile at http://www.myspace.com/kimusinteruptus
Check out my late grandfather teach the Word of God at http://www.ttb.org.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]