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cbabe

(5,770 posts)
Sat Oct 18, 2025, 12:50 PM Saturday

The other Alaska airlift: Volunteers save dogs from a flooded Alaska village, 1 tiny plane at a time

https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/the-other-alaska-airlift-volunteers-save-dogs-21106508.php

The other Alaska airlift: Volunteers save dogs from a flooded Alaska village, 1 tiny plane at a time

By CEDAR ATTANASIO,
Associated Press
Updated Oct 17, 2025 4:10 p.m.

SEATTLE (AP) — The special delivery arrived in a plastic storage box after a chartered flight in bouncy single-propeller plane. Veterinarian Susan Shaffer Sookram snipped the zip ties securing the lid and greeted the cargo: four dogs, one with a gray collar bearing its name, Happy.

“What a scary ride!" she said. “You made it!”

As officials in Alaska work around the clock on one of the most significant airlift operations in state history — evacuating more than 1,000 people from remote, flood-battered villages on the coast of the Bering Sea — another rescue operation is playing out: getting the dogs left behind to safety, in hopes of later reuniting them with their owners.

The pet shelters closest to the devastated villages are in Bethel, a regional hub around 90 miles (150 kilometers) away by boat or plane.
When Bethel Friends of Canines, a nonprofit that helps rehome animals, learned that 50 to 100 dogs might be abandoned in one of the villages, Kipnuk, it scrambled to charter a plane to evacuate them.

“It costs us $3,000 to do this so and we don’t know how many times we’re gonna have to do it,” organizer Jesslyn Elliott said by phone Wednesday. “We’ve never had a natural disaster to this, like, magnitude. So this is all very, very foreign and new to us. So we’re just kind of winging it.”



Some of the last people to stay behind and serve the community are teachers. Schools in flooded towns have served as emergency shelters and meeting places through the relief effort.



When Bethel Friends of Canines worker Matthew Morgan landed in Kipnuk on Wednesday, the teachers had fed the dogs, coaxed them into crates and labeled them with tags listing their owners.

… more …


(Facebook donations to nonprofit)
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The other Alaska airlift: Volunteers save dogs from a flooded Alaska village, 1 tiny plane at a time (Original Post) cbabe Saturday OP
What about the cats? Where there any? mwmisses4289 Saturday #1
I bet cats are harder to find and capture for transport. You could contact the non profit via Facebook and ask. cbabe Saturday #2

cbabe

(5,770 posts)
2. I bet cats are harder to find and capture for transport. You could contact the non profit via Facebook and ask.
Sat Oct 18, 2025, 01:22 PM
Saturday
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