William Evon was evacuated from Kwigillingok after the remnants of Typhoon Halong hit the community. But he soon returned to help, working as a lead contractor repairing the village.
“It was mentally and physically tiring,” Evon remembered. “[I] think, first three nights I didn't sleep.”
And like Evon’s job, much of life in the village has adapted to recovery after the storm, like the school, which has become the command center for repair efforts. Evon’s office is a classroom. Inside, nearly every inch of a whiteboard is covered in names.
“This is the first week of after the storm,” Evon pointed to the board. “We took a note of the homes and names of lists of people to evacuate, and the homes that got damaged.”
One column designates homes that are damaged but maintain the bones to be renovated, ones that can be made livable again.
That word — livable — the workers mention it a lot. It’s the goal right now, to get Kwigillingok to a place people can move back into, even temporarily, even if it’s a bare-bones version of what it was.
Livable again
Vance Cahill is a crew member for Cruz Construction, one of the contracting teams working on the rebuild.
"When we first got here, this road that we’re driving on was an existing gravel road,” Cahill said. “But we had to put a lot of material because we weren’t able to even get to this side of the village."
Cahill said that the teams were able to get most of the stuff they needed to repair roads and houses delivered by barge before the Kuskokwim River froze up. Now, it’s go time while the frozen wetland can support machinery like bulldozers and forklifts. In the summer, Cahill said that it won’t be so easy.
“This is all tundra,” Cahill said, crunching through inches of snow. “We were sinking in this trying to clean up the debris. We need to do as much as we can while winter’s still here.”
In some parts of town, the October 2025 storm damage remains very visible. Tipped houses and chunks of displaced boardwalk are covered in snow. Homes that floated across the river remain lodged at distorted angles.
But in other areas, the contracting teams have been able to lift some floated homes that didn’t travel far. They’ve placed them on new foundations, rearranging neighborhoods.
In November 2025, the Alaska National Guard helped retrieve coffins that had been displaced from the cemetery, which await a springtime reburial. A pathway to one of the community's churches has been created. Cahill said that some of the residents who have returned to town use the space.
Some water and electrical lines have been restored, but the fixed-up homes remain without running water and sewer. Outside of the school and washateria, those who have remained or returned have relied on honey buckets and hauled and bottled water.
The way it was
Evon walks through his father’s house, which is in the process of repair. One side is intact, but jostled from the flood — furniture has shifted around and spices lay scattered, shaken off a rack.
The other side is bare, aside from a newly-installed Toyotomi stove, and painted a bright white.
“We renovated this room,” Evon explained. “Changed the wall, insulations. A new wall along with new beams.”
This part of the house was damaged by the flood waters. Evon pointed to where the stove and dishwasher used to be.
“I’m hopeful we can get all the things just like the way it was,” Evon said.
But for the community that’s long been dealing with flooding from storms, putting things back "the way it was" doesn’t get to the root of the problem.
Flooding has been an ongoing struggle for Kwigillingok. Community members remember storms flooding the village in the early 1980s. Even as recently as 2024, the village received a federal disaster declaration following an August storm.
Tribal leaders said they’d been talking about relocation for decades — ex-Typhoon Halong brought the issue to a head.
Right now, tribal administrators are entering conversations with their local corporation to begin the process of relocating and are looking at land options. There are several different relocation sites in mind.
Kipnuk, another village heavily impacted by the storm, is facing a similar future. The tribe recently began the process of voting on relocation sites.
A phased approach
According to Kwigillingok leadership, the current repairs are part of a band-aid solution. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding that’s in play right now can only support rebuilding things mostly as they were.
Jeremy Zidek, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said there is some wiggle room.
“Our disaster programs typically say that we're going to return damaged infrastructure in damaged structures to a pre-disaster condition,” Zidek said. “But there are exceptions, because it doesn't always make sense to just build something back the way it was.”
Zidek said some FEMA funds may be used in conjunction with state funds to make the repairs more flood resistant, though it’s on a case by case basis.
Though there’s no set timeline, the state estimates that repairs will take over a year to finish. They anticipate that the majority of the repairs will be completed by late fall 2027.
“Things are going to happen in a phased approach,” Zidek explained.
But that’s just for the structures that can be salvaged. Zidek said that the state has applied for FEMA assistance to fund full rebuilds of the homes that were fully destroyed. Even if that money doesn’t come through, Zidek said that there are other avenues. Things are just on hold until that FEMA decision.
Part of the hope of the state's phased approach is that as homes are made livable, residents will have the option to return to the village. Evon said that the community anticipates that some residents will return during the spring and summer subsistence seasons, but only temporarily.
“Permafrost is melting rapidly, year, every year, and our land is sinking, and the minor floods, they're starting to reach the houses,” Evon explained. He said that some don’t plan on ever coming back and that the trauma of the storm has united the community in wanting to find higher ground for their home.
“We don't want to see that anymore. We want to relocate,” said Evon.
Evon said that the community estimates that a full relocation could be at least a decade away.
