Coordinating the Typhoon Merbok winter-time response in Alaska Story by Cmdr. Kent R. Catlin, District 17 Typhoon Merbok pounded Alaska’s western coast as it made landfall Sept. 17, pushing homes off their foundations and tearing apart protective berms as it flooded communities. Storms aren’t unusual here, but Merbok built up over unusually warm water. Its waves reached 50 feet over the Bering Sea, and the storm surge sent water levels into communities at near record highs along with near hurricane-force winds. The storm also hit during the fall subsistence harvest season, when the region’s indigenous communities are stocking up food for the winter. The most outstanding impact feature was the tremendous area that was damaged. All coastal regions north of Bristol Bay to just beyond the Bering Strait—hundreds of miles of coastline—suffered some impact. In Nome, one of the few places in western Alaska with long- term ocean level information, the ocean was more than 10 feet above the low-tide—the highest in nearly half a century. The day the typhoon hit, Sector Anchorage established an incident management team, and District 17 sent me, their emergency preparedness liaison officer, to the State Emergency Operation Center in Anchorage. Eleven days later, the initial response was winding down, but FEMA’s recovery efforts were just kicking off. We had been told that FEMA was not foreseeing much use for the Coast Guard moving forward with regard to mission assignments, but the day after Sector Anchorage stood down their IMT, a FEMA representative said they had changed their plans and were going to issue us a mission assignment for the loan of incident management system subject matter experts to their Alaskan Arctic Air Operation Multi-Agency Task Force. While not the lead agency, we would be filling the role of a support agency for ESF5, or Emergency Support Function 5, which handles information and planning. A week later, an additional ESF7 (logistics) mission assignment was issued to the District to assist with FEMA’s ground operations. The task force that the Coast Guard became a part of was a whole-of-government effort, consisting of FEMA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, Civil Air Patrol, Department of Defense, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its operational mandate was to coordinate the movement of FEMA resources to the impacted area across northern Alaska. In most incidents, it is common for the Coast Guard to be assigned as the lead agency for ESF 10 (hazmat response) or ESF9 (search and rescue). Since events on the Southwest border in 2019, COVID-19, and Operation Allies Welcome, it’s becoming more common for federal agencies to reach out to the Coast Guard for its incident management expertise. FEMA's specific request to District 17 was for a planning section chief, a logistics section chief, an operations section chief, a finance and administration section chief, and an emergency preparedness liaison officer. Three of those were filled by D17’s reservists. “It was not only our ICS expertise that was being utilized by FEMA, but our experience in doing responses in the Arctic,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Saturnino, a Sector Anchorage reservist, the operations section chief. An aerial view taken during a search and rescue and damage assessment in Shishmaref, Alaska, shows the damage caused by Typhoon Merbok on Sept. 18. Typhoon Merbok produced extreme weather and sea conditions along the coastline of Alaska with some waves reaching 54 feet. Photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ian Gray. 14 ReseRvist . Issue 1 • 2023 CELEBRATING CELEBRATING 70 70 YEARS OF THE RESERVIST YEARS OF THE RESERVIST
