An editorial in last weekend’s Arizona Daily Sun described the paper’s “awe” at emergency response to the epic storm that dumped more than four feet of snow on Flagstaff. But while life in the city goes back to normal, stranded residents in Indian country are still digging out.
The West’s recent rash of apocalyptic weather has spread sparse emergency resources on reservations in the Southwest and South Dakota even more thin. According to a report in today’s Arizona Daily Sun, the Arizona National Guard has air dropped almost 22,000 meals to Navajo and Hopi families this week. About 22,000 gallons of drinking water have gone out as well, and “pilots [are] still finding communities they had not known about.”
Ice storms have hit the Cheyenne River Sioux in South Dakota equally hard. There, storms brought down thousands of power lines — bad news for what was already “one of the U.S.’s poorest communities,” according to the Wall Street Journal:
With just 10,000 residents spread across 2.8 million acres, many Cheyenne River families depend on electricity transmitted across hundreds of empty miles to run pumps for drinking water, or to power the ignition modules on natural-gas and propane heaters.
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Last year the tribe earned $175,000 leasing land to nontribal ranchers and deposited the money in an emergency fund. That fund is now exhausted, the tribal chairman said. A special Wells Fargo account established to help raise funds to evacuate tribal members with medical needs brought in just $450 in donations on its first day, said Eileen Briggs, a Cheyenne River Tribal executive.
A blizzard on Christmas Day wreaked similar havoc on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux. While that storm and its aftermath were a grim time on the rez, the tribe hopes to be better prepared next time. According to the Rapid City Journal:
For the first time, the tribe will keep an updated,
centralized list of dialysis patients, hospice patients and others
with life-threatening chronic health conditions — identified only
by a color code — that is cross-referenced to a reservation-wide
map in the case of a blizzard or other emergency.
For updates, check The Buffalo Post, a Native news blog that has been keeping close tabs on rescue efforts during each of these storms.
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