ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Crews scurried to turn the Alaska Airlines Sports Center into an emergency shelter for evacuated flood victims Wednesday night. Within hours there were 300 cots set up inside.
Harry Snyder was one of the people who spent the night there. Synder was evacuated from the village of Kwigillingok along with his wife, three young children, parents and at least a dozen other family members. All were staying at the Sports Center, he said.
Snyder described leaving his house to shelter with his parents in the village once the storm hit. He said it wasn’t long before the waters rose there too.
“My dad said, wake up- there’s water! There’s water under the house! And as soon as I looked out the window man, it was water, it was water, all over.”
Snyder grabbed his parents, wife and children and hopped on their four-wheeler. He said they barely made it to the school. As for his parent’s house, they could only find pieces of it, including a bedroom wall lying on the ground that miraculously still had a large family photo attached.
Snyder said the hardest part so far has been answering his children’s questions about when they can go home.
“Man, it was hard for me to say but I had to say something about it. I told them babies, ‘I’m sorry, the house is gone, it’s not where it was,’ it’s hard.”
Snyder said he doesn’t know what’s next, but he will likely be in Anchorage for a while. He hopes to find a job and a more permanent place to live.
“We are going to start off from scratch, we are going to start a new chapter,” he said.
For now, they are getting the basics like food and clothing at the shelter. The Red Cross said Thursday that it has received enough donated items for people at the Sports Center Shelter and asked people to please not drop off anything else for the time being.
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