A series of winter storms hit Nome with deep snow and high winds, causing school closures, flight cancellations, and significant snow removal challenges.
Nome's landscape is physically altered, with raw material scattered wildly, the coastline reconfigured, and camps that anchored generations of subsistence either flattened or gone.
A historically powerful storm slammed into Western Alaska Friday night and into Saturday, bringing major flooding and high winds to a huge swath of coastal communities. By Saturday evening, the state said it had received no reports of injuries or deaths related to the storm. But damage had torn across hundreds of miles of Alaska’s coastline impacting communities all along the way. Alaskans described water flooding homes and roads. Wind tore off roofs. Houses floated off their foundations. Boats sank.
Strong south winds hit 71 miles per hour in St. Michael, Shishmaref had its sea ice blown away and the Nome Airport saw 0.64 inches of precipitation – mostly in the form of rain - last weekend. The storm that hit on Saturday, Dec. 18 and continued all day Sunday brought the total precipitation for December thus far to 2.04 inches.
Back-to-back winter storms hit Nome and the region with very strong, screaming winds and accompanying blowing snow. While the first storm on Friday seemed just like a warm up, the second storm hit the region with very strong winds that knocked out power in Wales, ripped buildings apart in Golovin and brought water levels up 6.73 feet over normal. The high winds also pushed away ice cover.
"I've seen photos documenting one squirrel in Nome from 2007 and a Nome Nugget article in 2019, but we've had 3-4 reports of red squirrels this summer."
Similar to the last storm that hit the region earlier this month, there is hardly any sea ice in the Bering Sea to minimize the damage to coastal areas.
“My boys told me my cabin went into the river,” said Rita Hulkill, who is 82. “My cabin had been there since the 70s. The water has never been that high ever.”
Late last week a strong Bering Sea storm hit the region, bringing winds up to 50mph, blowing snow, and high-water. Some communities saw significant erosion while others were mostly unscathed.
Public health officials confirmed that four Nome residents had been hospitalized in early January with preliminary results pointing to poising from foodborne type E botulism from an aged beluga flipper.
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