Alaska National Guard helps fly 7 tons of meat to Toksook Bay

This Thanksgiving, instead of turkeys, households in Toksook Bay are each getting 100-pound portions of various meats, delivered this month through a military assistance program that is growing more popular in Alaska.

The small community of some 600 people along the coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta was hit hard in 2022 by the remnants of Typhoon Merbok as it battered much of Western Alaska.

Two years on, many communities are still physically and economically recovering, including Toksook Bay.

“We are 50% complete,” said Robert Pitka with the Nunakauyarmiut Tribe, which is overseen by the local traditional council. “We still have fish camps that need fixing, we still have homes that need repair.”

During the storm, Pitka said, many households lost electricity. Stores of wild food put away for winter spoiled, and damaged equipment prevented hunters from being able to go out for fall time prey like moose. As part of their recovery, the tribe decided to use federal emergency relief money to buy 14,000 pounds of frozen chicken, pork and beef from a butcher shop in Eagle River.

Earlier this month, the Alaska National Guard started transporting 50-pound boxes of the frozen meat from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson to Toksook Bay by way of Bethel under the military’s Innovative Readiness Training Program.

“The IRT program pairs U.S. communities that have an unsourced requirement, usually medical services, construction, cybersecurity or transportation, with military units that can provide the services while simultaneously gaining real-world readiness training,” Alan Brown, director of public affairs for the Alaska National Guard, said in a written statement.

The program is run out of the Defense Department, and was started during the Clinton administration in the early 1990s. It deploys military services and personnel to fill unmet civilian needs when doing so can be used as a training exercise to give units more experience, according to the Defense Department. The program has been utilized more frequently in Alaska the last few years, according to Brown. In 2024, there were four other IRT missions in the state. Usually the work is carried out by Alaska National Guard units. But not exclusively. According to Brown, one recent IRT deployment involved building materials flown to Nuiqsut on the North Slope by the Kentucky Air National Guard.

“Training wise, the Toksook Bay mission provided aviators, load masters, crew chiefs and logistics specialists valuable reps in rapidly moving a large quantity of palletized provisions,” Brown said in the statement.

Alaska National Guard cargo planes moved the meat from JBER to Bethel, and then helicopters flew most of the cargo to Toksook Bay last week, the Guard said. Crews had to pause their work because of poor weather. According to Pitka, the last delivery was made on Monday.

“It’s all completed, the mission is accomplished,” Pitka said.

The tribe applied to the IRT program on the advice of federal and state organizations it meets with regularly on recovery coordination. Pitka said they submitted their application this spring and understood it could take up to two years for it to go through, “but it was approved sooner than we thought.”

He estimated that the partnership saved the tribe upwards of $30,000 it would have otherwise paid in freight costs to move the meat more than 500 miles.

It’s a help to have food to distribute to families in the community, Pitka said. But the town’s recovery is far from complete, with lumber and building supplies staged to keep up repairs on homes and fish camps in the months ahead.

“There’s still more work to do,” Pitka said.