n January 16, a fire destroyed the water plant and washeteria in the southwest Alaska village of Tuluksak.

For the village of about 350 people, it was a devastating blow. The water plant was the only source of drinking water in the village, in which the primarily Yup’ik residents lack indoor plumbing and rely on honey buckets, not uncommon in the flat, swampy region. With COVID-19 raging through the region at the time—one-third of village residents had already tested positive—having enough water for even basic sanitation needs, as well as drinking water, was of the utmost importance.

Tuluksak is located on the Tuluksak River, a tributary of the Kuskokwim River about 37 air miles upstream from Bethel, the regional hub. There are no roads to the village, except for a seasonal ice road on the river if conditions are good, so most freight must be flown or barged in.

Winters in the region are harsh, and snowfall was especially heavy this winter, according to officials. The village was additionally hampered by the fact that the person responsible for keeping the runway plowed had been medevacked to Anchorage with COVID-19 complications.

Judy Patrick Photography | Donlin

In true Alaska fashion, the business community and other organizations stepped in to help. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation (YKHC) met with the State of Alaska, Indian Health Service, and several federal agencies to discuss short and long-term solutions and funding, according to Brian Lefferts, director of the Office of Environmental Health and Engineering for YKHC. Three weeks after the fire, Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy issued an emergency disaster declaration for the village.

Lefferts says YKHC divided its response plan into four major phases. First was the need to secure a supply of drinking water. Second, a temporary reverse osmosis water treatment plant that would provide limited water supplies for the community. Third is bringing in a mobile water treatment plant with a much greater capacity than the reverse osmosis plant. Finally, rebuilding the village’s permanent water treatment infrastructure.

However, Alaska’s small air cargo and commuter airlines are ideally suited for those conditions. Carriers such as DesertAir, Ryan Air, Yute Commuter Service, and regional airline Ravn Alaska worked together to get water and freight to the community.

Some smaller shipments also were delivered by truck via the Kuskokwim Ice Road.

The effort attracted some unlikely partnerships. PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Alaska, major rivals in the beverage industry, teamed up in partnership with Ravn Alaska to donate 6,000 pounds of water to Tuluksak.

“Alaskans are stronger together,” said Rob McKinney, CEO of Ravn Alaska, in a news release. “As the new Ravn Alaska, we are more than just an air service. We’re Alaskans and committed to serving our communities in need.”

Donlin Gold, which is developing a world-class gold deposit in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, also was an early contributor.

Officials from Donlin Gold contacted the Tuluksak Tribal Council when it learned about the fire and discovered that the main priority was drinking water, according to Kristina Woolston, external affairs manager for Donlin Gold.

“Weather and poor runway conditions meant we could not fly water that same day from Anchorage, so we sourced from the nearest hub community, Bethel, and purchased all of the local bottled water and put it on two chartered small planes that day,” Woolston says. The shipment also included supplies such as baby wipes, paper towels, and sanitizing and cleaning supplies.

The deposit Donlin Gold is developing is located several dozen miles upstream on the Kuskokwim River from Tuluksak and holds an estimated 33 million ounces of gold, enough to generate an economy-changing mine that would employ thousands of people over twenty-seven-plus years.

“Donlin Gold has been working in the [Yukon-Kuskokwim] region for nearly twenty-five years,” says Woolston. “Our commitment to be a good neighbor includes long-term partnerships as well as responding to timely needs, such as the Tuluksak water crisis.”

On February 8, Donlin Gold teamed up with DesertAir to deliver more water and related supplies to the village.

DesertAir is an air cargo company with roots in Utah—hence the name, says President Joey Benetka, who worked for the company for about ten years before buying it two years ago.

It has a fleet of three 1944 Douglas DC-3s, which have a freight capacity of 6,500 pounds, oversize doors to accommodate large objects, and the ability to land on dirt and gravel runways as short as 2,800 feet. They’re a little bit older and take a little more work to maintain, Benetka says, but they’re one of the best-suited planes for rural Alaska.

“The villages make up the entirety of our business,” Benetka says. “If they weren’t there, we wouldn’t have anyone. So we need them to survive and they need us to survive, especially at a time when they have an issue or crisis.

“So when we recognized there was a need in the region, we reached out to Donlin Gold to combine our efforts to help out. Freight is expensive to send to rural Alaska, so we wanted to offer a flight we know would be well-utilized and full to maximum capacity.”

Donlin talked to Tuluksak tribal officials about what the community needed the most and came up with a list of supplies to help the village access non-potable water that residents could boil and use for washing dishes, laundry, cleaning, and other uses.

The supplies filled a DesertAir DC-3:

• Six 200-gallon Greer water tanks that can be filled at the river and transported in a truck bed or behind a four-wheeler or snowmachine to fill the large containers Donlin also provided. These are filled at the river and then used to bring water to individual homes.
• Pumps, hoses, and a small generator to pump the water from the 200-gallon container to the in-home container
• Ninety-five 32-gallon garbage cans (larger in-home water containers)
• Fifty Rubbermaid totes (for bathing and clothes washing containers)
• Fifty washboards (old school, to do laundry)
• Fifty floor brushes (also for clothes washing)
• Sanitation wipes, diapers, paper towels, cleaning supplies, masks, and any other sanitation items that would fit on the plane
• Water in larger bio-friendly containers for drinking

Donlin also contributed financial support so tribal officials could hire local residents to fill the 200-gallon tanks and deliver the water to homes, Woolston says.

Middy Peter, chair of the Native Village of Tuluksak, says, “We, the community of Tuluksak, are very grateful for the enormous support that Donlin Gold and DesertAir have provided.”

A week after that big shipment arrived in Tuluksak, Donlin Gold officials traveled via two trucks on the Kuskokwim Ice Road to the village to deliver a hundred 5-gallon water containers bought in Bethel. The company also underwrites the ice road for maintenance and safety.

Judy Patrick Photography | Donlin

On the way back to Bethel, the trucks carried loads of empty water bottles, which were dropped off in Bethel for recycling.

Woolston says Donlin is continuing to work with Tuluksak officials to address their long term needs.

“It provides water throughout the school so they can have school in session, provide lunches for kids, and is a source of potable water,” Lefferts says of the plant. “But it’s not a water treatment plant. It requires a ton of upkeep and maintenance, regular filter changes. It’s just not designed as a long-term sustainable solution.”

Rebuilding the washeteria and water plant could take a couple of years, so in the interim, YKHC decided to bring in a mobile water treatment plant that could hold up to 10,000 gallons. That plan quickly ran into some hurdles.

Lefferts says that while the plant is considered portable, it weighs about 55,000 pounds and is housed in a 24-foot by 36-foot building and associated water storage tank.

A proposal to move it upstream to the village via the Kuskokwim Ice Road also had to be dropped.

“We’ve kind of had a weird weather year this year,” Lefferts says. “Record snowfall, which insulated the river and made it slow to freeze. We needed at least 30 inches of ice. Even before the fire, it was only 15 inches thick.”

“It just never thickened up enough to be safe to move the plant this year,” Lefferts says. “And we tried, all the way through the middle of April. We just recently gave up.”

At one point, the Alaska Army National Guard considered using a Chinook heavy-lift helicopter like the one it used to move the “Into the Wild” bus from its location off Stampede Trail last summer. But the water plant proved to be too heavy.

So now, the plan is to barge the water plant up to Tuluksak this summer. The emergency declaration that is allowing the village to use water from the system set up at the school is good through July 31, which should be enough time to get the mobile plant set up and running, Lefferts says.

Actual construction may take a year or more.

“We always wish we could do things faster,” Lefferts says. “It’s stressful, I’m sure, with weather delays and other things preventing water from getting there, or as you’re watching the water supply start to decrease while you’re waiting for the next supply to get in. We had a lot of terrible weather this winter. I don’t want to underplay how stressful that must have been.

“I’m also really proud of the response from the YKHC, the federal government, nonprofits like the Rasmuson Foundation, community foundations—you just go down the list,” he says. “There’s so many people that wanted to help us and stepped up to help out.”