A tribe on the North Slope hosted an emergency management course in Utqiagvik last week. Organizers said it's the first for a tribe in Alaska, and part of an effort to bolster coordination between communities in the Arctic during disasters.
Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope is a regional tribe representing Utqiagvik and seven other North Slope villages. The tribe worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to host the course.
"The outcome is enhancing the communication from all attendees and becoming better at being prepared to respond to different levels of incidences, emergencies that we face within the Arctic that are increasingly occurring," said Stephanie Nelson, the tribe's director of emergency management.
The four-day Integrated Emergency Management Course brought together over 50 people each day. Participants included state and federal emergency managers, local leaders representing villages and cities, North Slope Borough and tribal governments, as well as businesses tied to the local oil and gas industry, including ConocoPhillips and Santos.
Nelson said that two major discussions focused on scenarios similar to actual emergencies from 2022 – like Typhoon Merbok in Point Hope, and a gas leak at the Alpine oil field, near Nuiqsut.
Participants used those examples to discuss how cities, the North Slope Borough and tribal governments can work together in an emergency.
"Community members were able to kind of discuss different aspects in regards to who responds, how does this get relayed to the public, and how do we communicate with one another, from local community to the region?" Nelson said.
The course is a result of the tribe's efforts to implement an official emergency management program. They are the second tribe in Alaska to do that, following the Tlingit and Haida Council.
John Pennington, a professor of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is an advisor to the tribe and helped put the program together.
"It's using the strength of the Alaska Native communities that are the North Slope to improve emergency management through the lens of Alaska Natives, first and foremost," he said.
Pennington said that communities in the Arctic have been seeing intensifying storms and erosion. They also see disasters that federal emergency managers are not familiar with – such as an ice-souring event that in 2023 severed all communications for three months across the North Slope.
"That doesn't fit into FEMA's book of what a disaster is, but for us as a community up there, it was a huge disaster," he said.
The state of Alaska is responsible for a vast area where several communities can experience different disasters at the same time. Pennington says that the tribe's new emergency program will help North Slope communities to seek disaster declarations directly from the federal government when needed – which can speed up the delivery of assistance.
Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope is also implementing its own emergency alert system, which is similar to the Amber alert system. It sends out warnings and messages to residents when they are in the range of a natural disaster, need to shelter in place or are on a boil water notice.
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