After a devastating storm, the people who fled a remote coastal village face an existential question.
Dec. 5, 2025
From the beige confines of Room 207 at the Aspen Suites Hotel on the outskirts of Anchorage, Maggie Paul and her daughter, Jamie, struggle to envision the future.
A little more than a month ago, the women were evacuated along with about 1,000 others from Kipnuk, their remote coastal village in western Alaska that was destroyed by the remnants of a typhoon. They were airlifted to safety; there are no roads to their community. Many landed in hotels about 500 miles away in Anchorage, which might as well be a different planet for all the ways the city differs from their tight-knit rural community.
It’s here the Pauls are wrestling with the kind of uncertainty facing more communities as the planet warms, weather grows more destructive and vulnerable places face repeated disasters.
Maggie Paul, 64, wants to return to Kipnuk and the way life used to be, before a series of floods and storms repeatedly bashed the village, with the most powerful blow yet landing on Oct. 12. However long it takes to put the decimated village back together, Ms. Paul said, “I will wait.”
Jamie Paul, 38, thinks the community’s only safe option is to move to higher ground, somewhere more protected. “The land is sinking,” she said, referring to the permafrost upon which the village was built and that is now buckling as rising temperatures cause it to thaw. “It’s not how it used to be.”
It’s a conundrum in search of clarity, with suspended lives in the balance.
