Typhoon leaves flooded Alaska villages facing a storm recovery far tougher than most Americans will ever experience

The remnants of a powerful typhoon swept through the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska on October 12, 2025, producing a storm surge that flooded villages up to 60 miles up the river. Water pushed homes off their foundations and left some afloat with people inside, officials said. More than 50 people had to be rescued in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, hundreds were displaced in the area and at least one person died.

Typhoon Halong was an unusual storm, likely fueled by the Pacific’s near-record warm surface temperatures this fall. The timing means recovery will be even more difficult than usual for these hard-hit communities, as Alaska meteorologist Rick Thoman of the University of Alaska Fairbanks explains.

Disasters in remote Alaska are unlike those that occur anywhere else in the lower 48 states, he says. While East Coast homeowners recovering from a nor’easter that flooded parts of New Jersey and other states the same weekend can head to Home Depot for supplies or head to a hotel in case of flooding, none of that exists in remote Native villages.

What made this storm unusual?

Halong was a former typhoon, similar to Merbok in 2022, by the time it reached the delta. A week earlier, there had been a powerful typhoon east of Japan. The jet stream picked it up and carried it northeast, which is quite common, and weather models did a very good job predicting its path into the Bering Sea.

But as the storm approached Alaska, everything went haywire.

The weather model forecast changed, reflecting a faster-moving storm, and Halong took a very unusual path, moving between St. Lawrence Island and the coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Unlike Merbok, which had been very well forecast by global models, the final track and intensity of it were not clear until the storm was within 36 hours of passing through Alaskan waters. In many places, it is too late to carry out evacuations.

Has the loss of data from canceled weather balloons in 2025 affected the forecast?

That’s a question for future research, but here’s what we know for sure: There have been no weather balloon sightings aloft at St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea since late August or at Kotzebue since February. Bethel and Cold Bay are limited to one per day instead of two. In Nome, there were no weather balloons for two full days as the storm headed toward the Bering Sea.

Did all this cause the forecasts to be wrong? We don’t know because we don’t have the data, but it seems likely that this had an effect on the model’s performance.

Why is the delta region so vulnerable to a storm like Halong?

The land in this part of western Alaska is very flat, so large storms can push the ocean into the delta and the water spread there.

Most of the land there is very close to sea level, in some places less than 10 feet above the high tide line. Permafrost is also melting, land is sinking, and rising sea levels are increasing the risk. For many people, there is literally nowhere to go. Even Bethel, the region’s largest city, located about 60 miles up the Kuskokwim River, experienced flooding from Halong.

These are very isolated communities, with no roads leading to towns. The only way to get there is by boat or plane. Right now, many people have nowhere to live and winter is coming.

These villages are also small. They do not have additional housing or the resources to recover quickly. The region was already recovering from major flooding in the summer of 2024. The Kipnuk tribe was able to obtain federal disaster assistance, but this aid was not approved until early January 2025.

What are these communities facing in terms of recovery?

People are going to have some really tough decisions to make. Are they leaving the community for the winter and hoping to rebuild next summer?

There is likely not much housing available in the area with widespread flooding and a shortage of housing. Are displaced people going to Anchorage? Cities are expensive.

There is no easy answer.

It’s logistically complicated to rebuild in places like Kipnuk. You can’t just phone up and call your local building contractor.

Almost all supplies have to arrive by barge – from plywood to nails to windows – and that won’t happen in the winter. You can’t transport it by truck: there are no roads. Planes can only fly in small quantities: the runways are short and not designed for cargo planes.

The National Guard might be able to help fly in supplies. But you still need to have people capable of carrying out construction and other repair work.

Everything is 100 times more complicated when it comes to building in remote communities. Even if national or state aid were approved, it would take until next summer before most homes could be rebuilt.

Does climate change play a role in storms like these?

This will be another question for future research, but sea surface temperatures across most of the North Pacific that Typhoon Halong passed through before reaching the Aleutian Islands have been much warmer than normal. Warm water fuels storms.

Halong also brought a lot of very warm air to the north. East of the trail, on October 11, Unalaska reached 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), a record low for the month of October.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.