On a Sunday morning last month, James Taq'ac Amik was huddled on a small bridge with his girlfriend. At 4 a.m., they had scrambled into an 18-foot aluminum motor boat, fleeing floodwaters from a massive storm surge that inundated Kipnuk, a village of 700 people in the heart of western Alaska's sprawling Kuskokwim river delta.

"I couldn't make it up. I tried, but the wind was too strong to try and go by boat, so we ended up staying on the bridge for five hours," Amik said. Things only grew more dramatic. "The houses started drifting away around 5:30 a.m.," Amik said. "There was still lights in them, there was people in them."

When they set out, the couple was planning to head to Kipnuk's public school, the largest building in the Alaska Native Yup'ik village. At least that building, they

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