The Role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Five Alutiiq Villages as Revealed by the 1964 Earthquake

by Rachel Mason, adapted from Nancy Yaw Davis’s 1970 article, “The Role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Five Pacific Eskimo Villages as Revealed by the Earthquake,” in the Committee on the Alaska Earthquake report The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, Human Ecology Volume, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, pp. 125-146.

The Great Alaska Earthquake was a terrible disaster for residents of five Alutiiq villages in Prince William Sound and the Kodiak Archipelago. It destroyed the Alaska Native (then known to themselves as Aleut, to the academic community as Pacific Eskimo, and today known as Alutiiq or Sugpiaq) villages of Chenega, Kaguyak, and Afognak, and greatly damaged Old Harbor and Ouzkinkie.

 

Pre-earthquake map showing villages of Chenega,
Kaguyak, and Afognak.

Anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis lived in Anchorage at the time of the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964. In the following weeks, she interviewed residents of the destroyed village of Kaguyak and the nearly destroyed village of Old Harbor who had been evacuated to Red Cross-operated shelters in Anchorage. In 1965, she traveled to interview the residents of three additional Alutiiq communities: Afognak (whose residents were relocated to Port Lions), Ouzinkie, and Chenega. From the beginning of her research, it was evident to Davis that the Russian Orthodox Church played an important role in villagers’ explanations of the disaster and their willingness to leave the original village and relocate to another site. The research would result in Davis's 1971 doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington: "The Effects of the 1964 Earthquake, Tsunami and Resettlement on Two Koniag Eskimo Villages."

The following excerpts are from Nancy Yaw Davis’s article in the multi-volume report on the earthquake published by the National Academy of Sciences. I have focused on the experiences of the three villages that were completely destroyed and not rebuilt: Chenega, Kaguyak, and Afognak.

The Importance of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alutiiq villages:

One of the most lasting influences of the Russian period in Alaska (1742-1847) was the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church. (p. 128)

In all five villages, the church is a prominent landmark. Each building is well cared for and often has been constructed on land slightly higher than the rest of the community. Each church has at least 60 icons. Chenega reportedly had more than 100 icons. (p. 128)

 

Chenega before the 1964 earthquake.

The only village-wide activities are church-related ones. As a woman in Chenega said when asked about social activities, “Church is mostly what we do.” Even in the three villages, Old Harbor, Ouzinkie, and Afognak, where Protestant missions were gaining support before the earthquake, the Russian holidays are shared by all the native community. No other institution touches so many of the people as deeply, consistently, and thoroughly as the Russian church. (p. 129)

Chenega:

The first wave struck Chenega before the ground had stopped shaking. The water caught and carried out 23 of the 76 residents, most of their homes, and their church. (p. 132)

The significance of the church was reflected in the frequent references made to this institution by the villagers. Several survivors who were near the church site in the center of the village mentioned seeing the building crack, bow, and break apart. No other building was mentioned. (p. 132)

Several people said that if the church had stood they would have stayed in Chenega, but since it was gone, they were willing to be evacuated to Cordova. (p. 132)

Kaguyak:

Three hundred miles away on Kodiak Island, most of the adult men of Kaguyak had worked all day on their near church. Immediately after the earthquake, one of their first concerns was the new building. [The men checking on the church] looked out a church window just in time to see the first surge of water coming over the bank. They ran to join the other villagers who were already scrambling for a small hill behind the village. (pp. 133-134)

 

Kaguyak in the 1950s. This photo and that of Afognak below were taken
from the boat Evangel during one of the Smith family's mission trips to
the Kodiak area villages. Photos from Tim Smith's website:
www.tanignak.com/ouzinkie

[After the third wave, h]ouses were pulled up and forced into the lake. The first building to go was their new church. This loss, perhaps more than anything up to that point, upset the people:

“When I see that church I was crying all over the place…And the wave took it away from us. Nothing left in that village. Everything all gone.” (pp. 134-135)

Afognak:

[In Afognak, where Protestant missionaries had been working], the movie King of Kings was to be shown on Good Friday morning. (p. 135)

When the earthquake began the immediate response in Afognak was similar in that in each of the other communities: open the doors, turn off the stove, gather the children, get out of the house, and watch the tides. Moderate concern was shown for the church building; the lay reader instructed his eldest son to check on it. When the son reached the church, he was amazed to find that no oil had been spilled from the altar vessels and only one old icon had fallen. Soon other people began to gather by the church, “to watch the tides,” they said. The lay reader’s house became the major center of activity throughout the night (p. 135)

 

Afognak in the 1950s.

The Russian church building in Afognak, like that in Old Harbor, withstood the tsunami well. Although houses near the church were washed off their foundations and pushed into the trees, the church was not moved. (p. 136)

Relocation:

Like the Chenegans, the people of Kaguyak no longer had a reason for returning to the site of their former village. About 4 weeks after the disaster, the Kaguyak people, with the exception of one family and two unmarried men, had moved to Akhiok…a small village of 90 persons near old Kaguyak, near the southern tip of Kodiak Island. (p. 138)

Kaguyak and Old Harbor residents remained in Anchorage for 5 to 6 weeks before being relocated [the Old Harbor residents back to their village]. In Anchorage, one of the first actions of the villagers was to emphasize to the Red Cross shelter leaders that they were all Russian Orthodox and did not want to be visited by people from other religious groups. (p. 137)

In Afognak the church was still standing, but it did not have the same attraction for the village people that the churches in the other three villages did. More important to Afognak villagers was the fact that their wells had been contaminated and their roads were being washed away by the tides that now came up into the village. The building of a new church was only one of the points raised at the meeting with the Lions International, the 49th District Lions, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives, who helped the village move and rebuild. (pp. 138-139)

Explanations:

Unlike the people of Chenega, Kaguyak, and Old Harbor, the people of Afognak when interviewed did not constantly and spontaneously refer to their church, nor did the blame the missionaries for the disaster. However, one older woman is reported to have said, “The reason we are having the earthquake is because it was Good Friday and they were showing a movie, and God was mad.” (p. 136)

Explanations were seldom spontaneously volunteered by the Chenegans, the people most severely affected. Even when asked specifically, informants usually changed the subject or quietly commented, “I don’t know.” The question probably was too disturbing to answer. There was an aura of fear. One person said, “There was something evil down there or something.” In contrast to the reticent response by Chenegans, Kaguyakans gave frequent, spontaneous, elaborate, and church-oriented explanations of the disaster. (p. 142)

Personal memories from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill: Rehabilitating sea otters

by Shana Loshbaugh

For me, the Exxon Valdez oil spill was about sea otters.

Like many Alaskans, I turned on the radio the morning of March 24, 1989, and spent the following hours and days riveted in dismay as the oil and news of it spread. Could I do anything about the ghastly situation unfolding in Prince William Sound? Yes. I volunteered to go to Valdez. On April 5, I reported for work at the Valdez Otter Rescue Center and shampooed my first sea otter. Little did I know that the project would dominate my life for more than a year.

Prior to that, my sea otters had been distant brown spots bobbing in the coastal waters. I knew a few things about them. Biologically, they were big, shellfish-eating sea weasels that lived in groups and were clever enough to use tools. Historically, they were – arguably – responsible for the existence of “Alaska” as a geo-political entity because their luxuriant fur inspired Russian traders to trek to the ends of the known world. Contact with humans always seemed to work out badly for sea otters. The fur trade drove them close to extinction. They had been collateral damage during nuclear bomb tests in the Aleutians. In 1989, they were in history’s crosshairs again, accidental victims of our society’s insatiable lust for fossil fuels.

 

Unidentified protesters in Homer expressed
their opinions of Exxon in 1989.  Photo
by Doug Loshbaugh.

Working on the sea otter project was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, the best of jobs and the worst of jobs. The positive aspects included the amazing sea otters themselves; the fat filthy lucre of oil-spill paychecks; the heady idealism, altruism, and hard work; and the wonderful, inspirational people I met. The negative aspects included being away from my family; the poisonous crude; the corrosive cynicism, corruption, and incompetence; and the horrible, disheartening people I also met. I outlined the checkered history of the sea otter project in a 2009 talk to the Alaska Historical Society annual meeting in Unalaska, and wrote it up for the proceedings of that conference.

The spill’s 25th anniversary is a time to reflect on that bizarre experience and its long-range consequences. Following are my personal impressions.

Alaskans have divergent views of the spill in general and the otter project in particular. The oil spill remains abstract to many who were too young or living elsewhere at the time. It never was very relevant to communities far from the site or those whose lives never touched the sea. Some who live on the coast consider sea otters marine varmints that overrun shellfish beds and compete with people for resources. But many Alaskans, particularly fishermen and subsistence users in the affected areas, consider the Exxon Valdez oil spill a festering environmental and socioeconomic wound, and they feel a kinship with the sea otters’ suffering.

 

A mother otter cuddling her pup in a holding pen
at Little Jakalof Bay near Homer. Photo by
Doug Loshbaugh.

 

These people also see the otter project as part of the larger spill-response effort and Exxon’s troubled legacy. Few who drew large paychecks from Exxon in 1989 respected or trusted the company. Feeding the alienation was a sense that Exxon thought money was more important to the region’s people than the damaged environment, resources, and the lifestyles they had supported; a sense that Exxon expected checks to satisfy Alaskans’ grievances. A related problem was the role of profiteers, exploiters, and outright criminals who flocked to the oil-spill scene to line their pockets and use more innocent or vulnerable colleagues. The otter center was the first place I ever encountered a professional con artist or “stress-induced psychosis.” Petty theft was rife, and factional disputes went all the way to the top. Co-workers made efforts to report crime and mismanagement, but, other than a case involving fraudulent boat contracts featured in the state news, those in charge seemed uninterested in punishing malfeasance. While some people in the USA claim that government is incompetent and private corporations better suited to manage our resources and economy, I cannot imagine anyone familiar with Exxon’s 1989 and subsequent performance in Alaska asserting that view.

Working on the spill was, I admit, a rare opportunity to hold a managerial post and network with professionals. Circumstances threw together diverse but passionate people for long and stressful hours that led to a rare sense of camaraderie. The sea-otter project led to at least four marriages and one divorce. Its excitement, motivation, and quirkiness made it thrilling if not fun.

 

Burt Wood, Leslie McBain, and two others
washing an otter in Valdez, April 1989.
Photo by Shana Loshbaugh.

But on another level, otter center work was traumatic. We witnessed beautiful animals dying in droves despite our toil. Afterwards, those memories reinforced my concerns about human-caused environmental damage. I became almost obsessed about “reduce, reuse, recycle.” One colleague talked about “post-otter stress syndrome,” and another told me how she pulled her car over to the side of the highway to weep during a radio story on the spill’s first anniversary. Scientists involved found their careers blighted by association with Exxon. Years after the ship hit Bligh Reef, I had a nightmare in which I heard the piercing scream of a distressed sea otter and frantically searched for the beast.

The unique chance to spend time with sea otters opened our eyes to what extraordinary creatures they are and gave us a glimpse of their lives in a complex society alien to our own. Just to touch their fabled fur was a delight. Their pups were the cutest creatures imaginable. But most amazing was their behavior. Alone, they languished; but when placed in groups they perked up and recovered. Again and again, caretakers witnessed otters interacting in affectionate and altruistic ways that implied intelligence, emotion, and empathy. When frightened, otters clutched each other; when content, they held hands (paws) with a friend. Pen mates carried food to a mother otter that would not leave her sleeping pup at feeding time. Most disturbing was an incident in which a healthy otter drowned after a veterinarian sedated it for a routine procedure. The other otters tried to save their friend, holding it up by the armpits on each side and trying to keep its face out of the water. With mixed feelings, we saw the otters grow tame and friendly. As young ones patted my leg, begging for food, my heart ached. On the one hand, I knew that such trust put them at high risk of being shot after release. On the other hand, their touch was a fantasy-come-true of gentle contact with wild creatures. Is it possible to describe such observations without anthropomorphizing?

Did the sea otter rescue effort help the wildlife at all? The answer is complex. For the population, in the short run: no. Recovering since the 1911 international fur seal treaty, the species is no longer endangered. Damage assessment studies estimated that the oil directly killed about 3,000 otters, mostly in Prince William Sound. That contrasted with 436 animals captured for “rescue” of which 187 were released to the wild eventually. Despite people’s helpful intent, additional animals may have died due to the stress of capture, transport, and life in captivity. For individual animals, there is no question that the intervention saved lives, especially for the 36 juvenile and handicapped otters that spent the rest of their lives in captivity. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service only declared the sound’s sea otter populations recovered in February 2014. For the long run, I believe the project did help the wildlife, at least in the hypothetical case of any future oil spills or other events prompting people to put otters into “protective custody.” Fears that the stint of captivity would transfer lethal diseases from domestic animals to wild otters did not materialize. One good side effect of the bad situation was the unprecedented leap in expertise regarding sea-otter capture, medicine, and husbandry. This already has been applied in places such as the Alaska SeaLife Center.

 

Liz Simonis and Kathy Hill, workers at the Little Jakalof sea otter
facility, snapped photos during the release at McCarty Fjord in
Kenai Fjords N.P. in August 1989. Exxon arranged to fly otters
and their caretakers via helicopter to release sites. Photo
by Shana Loshbaugh.

What people learned, on a larger scale, led to revamped spill-response plans that include more sophisticated wildlife response. Alyeska and other entities have pre-fab, modular otter centers in storage. They contract with companies to provide trained responders in the event of future spills. There’s even a book on how to rehabilitate sea otters, written by veterans of the 1989 project.

This year, as people reflect on this anniversary of the oil spill, we do so with knowledge of newer fiascos such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and of looming threats such as ocean acidification and climate change. Sea otters remain symbols of wild Alaska and its vulnerability to human error and hubris.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill – Twenty-five years later

by Toby Sullivan

For thousands of Alaskans, the spill was a collective experience, and as such has become one of the defining moments of modern Alaska, second only to the 1964 earthquake. And like any historical event, there are two ways that the story of the spill lives on. First there’s the documented story: the newspaper files, the reams of data from public testimony and court documents, the photographs and audio recordings, and the published research done since the spill. And then there’s the memory of the people who were there, an experience mapped in neurons, recalled as images and emotion.

First, the facts. On the evening of March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez untied from the Alyeska oil terminal in Valdez, fully loaded with 1.2 million barrels of North Slope crude. A little after midnight, Third Mate Jeffery Cousins, left alone on the bridge by Captain Joseph Hazelwood soon after departing Valdez, and apparently trying to avoid icebergs, steered across the inside corner of a dogleg traffic channel and impaled the ship on Bligh Reef. The momentum of the ship over the reef ripped a gash eighteen feet wide and 60 feet long though the 3/4-inch steel hull. Driven by the head pressure of tanks whose tops were 60 feet above the waterline, oil came up from the bottom of the ship at the rate of 20,000 barrels an hour. The response from officials, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the U.S. Coast Guard, Exxon Corporation and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, was confusion on a very large scale.

Although Alyeska's oil spill contingency plan mandated that a vessel loaded with skimmers and booms be at the scene of a spill within five and a half hours, the containment barge was dry-docked with a broken weld, and the skimmers and heavy duty boom that went with it were buried under tons of lightweight harbor boom in a warehouse. In the predawn darkness, workers used a crane and a forklift to sort the boom and get it onto the barge. After hours of this, and just as the equipment was finally loaded, word came that the barge was needed instead to move fenders and other lightering equipment to the grounded tanker. Another ship, the Exxon Baton Rouge, was being maneuvered to pump off the oil still onboard the Exxon Valdez. An hour went by while workers searched for the fenders under the snow. The boom that had just been loaded on the barge was unloaded and the lightering equipment was craned aboard. It became apparent that the response plan was a fiction.

At 2:30 p.m., fourteen hours after the tanker went aground, the barge with the boom and skimmers finally arrived on scene at the Exxon Valdez. By 5:30 p.m., the oil had pretty much stopped pouring from the ruptured hull. Estimates put the amount of oil in the water at 240,000 barrels (11 million gallons), the largest oil spill in U.S history.

For three days, in calm weather, the oil slowly spread from the tanker while confusion reigned in Valdez. Alyeska skimmed up several thousand barrels but found it had nowhere to put it. Fishermen from Cordova scooped oil into buckets and ran into the same problem. Officials and biologists and oil industry experts began what would become a protracted argument over the use of dispersants, essentially dishwashing detergent sprayed from C-130 airplanes. Alyeska's contingency plan had claimed 100,000 barrels would be recovered within 48 hours of a large spill, but by Sunday, March 26, less than 3,000 barrels had been skimmed off. The only good news was that the Exxon Baton Rouge had maneuvered alongside the Exxon Valdez and begun pumping off the remaining one million barrels.

For three days the oil lay in a great black mass attended by a few skimmers, some boom and the fishermen from Cordova, armed with their five-gallon buckets. And then the wind began to blow. By the morning of the 27th, 70-mile-an-hour gusts and 20-foot waves had swept the boom away and sent the skimmers scuttling back into Valdez Arm. The fishermen sought shelter in the Cordova small boat harbor. By Tuesday the wind had spread the oil west across 500-square miles of water and onto the beaches of Smith and Naked islands. Pictures of dead otters and bald eagles were on television screens around the planet. Within a week the wind and the prevailing westerly setting ocean current had carried the oil through the islands of the western Sound and out to the open ocean between the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island. By June, oil was washing up in Chignik, 700 miles from the spill.

Those are the facts, easily found in the documentation of the spill, and in the long recitation of history, those facts will last a long time. What will probably be harder to find as time goes on will be what always fades from large historical events –the look and smell and taste of what happened –the emotional landscape that survivors carry with them the rest of their lives. Except for a few oral histories, a few first person accounts, that sense of what the spill felt like – maybe the most important part of any experience – is going away.

So, for the record, here’s a few entirely subjective things I remember as a Kodiak fishermen who didn’t fish that year and instead spent the summer going to meetings and talking to lawyers and wiping rocks in Uganik Bay.

News of the spill came at eight o'clock on a snowy Friday morning, the barest facts on Alaska Public Radio. A tanker had hit a reef outside Valdez. The radio sat on the windowsill of my back porch, next to a cup of coffee. The herring gillnet I was building hung from a hook in the corner, green plastic mesh bundled with the corkline, a plastic needle full of white twine in my hand. The Kodiak herring season would begin in three weeks. According to officials, as of 6 a.m., there were 100,000 barrels of oil in the water. What did that mean? A soft tremor of distant catastrophe reverberated in the room with me. Wet snowflakes slid down the window, obscuring the view of Womens Bay. I went into the kitchen and asked my wife if she'd heard.

Three months later we were on contract with Veco, the company that ran the cleanup operation on Kodiak Island. My wife and daughter and I and three crewmembers were at our setnet fishing cabin in Uganik Bay, but we were not gillnetting salmon. We were wiping rocks and bagging dead birds on a beach across the bay. And in doing that we got a good long look at crude oil, at the thing itself. It was the darkest most beautiful shade of glistening black we had ever seen. The surface of any glove-full was usually so smooth, like liquid glass, that you could see your own curving reflection in it. But beneath the reflection the oil had a spooky blackness, a density of opaqueness and heavy viscosity that was like something from another planet. Even after being washed through 300 miles of ocean, it remained depthless and black and pure, the distilled blood of dinosaurs. I still have a glob in a canning jar that I take out and show people sometimes. It's dried out and no longer liquid, but it still looks weird, and it still sticks to your finger if you touch it.

In early August, the tender that was supposed to be picking up dead birds hadn't come around in a few days. A friend of mine and his two crewmen were burning oil soaked cormorants on the beach in front of their cabin on the other side of the bay from us. It required nothing but a little newspaper and a match to get them going. While they were staring into the little pyre of burning wings and webbed feet, a helicopter with a Veco "beach-assessment" team landed and a fat Texan with a cowboy hat walked over. He asked how things were going: Did they need any more absorbent towels, any boom? How was their fuel situation? My friend told him they had enough equipment; the problem was the whole thing itself –the oil, the dead birds, the not fishing.

"We're really not having much fun you know," my friend said. The Texan, who'd been hearing that kind of thing ever since he’d gotten off the plane from Houston two weeks before, squinted at him. "Y'all have joined the real world now, boy." We still say that line sometimes and laugh, acutely remembering the smell of burning oily birds, a mixture of coal smoke and rotten meat.

 

Helicopter at Uganik Bay, 1989 (Toby Sullivan)

Early in the summer we were thrilled with the helicopters. They were everywhere, and they were beautiful. Once when I flew into town in a chartered Cessna to get supplies, a guy in the Veco office told me they'd be happy to fly me back out in a helicopter if one was going that way. The next morning, I waited with a crowd of fishermen, Coast Guard officers, lawyers in suits, and various federal and state officials. It was like a taxi stand. Twenty Bell Jet Ranger helicopters sat at the end of the runway, shiny as new toys. Our pilot explained the procedure if we lost power (who's he kidding? I thought) and then we strapped in and took off. The ride was like sex, the pilot streaming us tight between mountains, his face exquisitely expressionless behind his wraparounds, the cliffs and vegetation at 150 knots like skin sliding against the window. We landed on the beach in front of my cabin. I stepped out in front of my wife and crewmembers like a god. The high lasted all day.

Every day helicopters landed on the beach where we worked to deliver edicts from the contractor, take the logs and crewmember time sheets back to town and to monitor the progress of the cleanup. One of the pilots told us the Veco guys were using the helicopters to count skiffs on the cleanup beach to make sure we were all working. One day my wife took our daughter back across the bay to our cabin to feed her some lunch. A helicopter hopped over the hill behind the cabin and hovered in the front yard like a giant insect, the pilot and an observer staring in the kitchen windows while my daughter stared back over a spoon full of macaroni and cheese. A few days later another helicopter swooped around the cabin trying to take pictures of my crewmembers while they ran behind the corners of the building, gulping sandwiches and beer. One morning a helicopter landed at a setnet fish camp across the bay and blew a tent with a couple of kids down the beach into the water.

By July, the crewmembers were getting edgy and bored, tired of wiping rocks all day in the rain, tired of watching for helicopters whenever they snuck back to the cabin for lunch. My wife was growing unhappy about keeping our daughter on the beach all day. The mail wasn't getting through on the Veco boats and driving 80 miles in an open skiff back to town for food was getting old. The helicopters flew down our beach at eye level four or five times a day, the sound of the turbines arriving like tearing metal, the grass flattening as they went by 40 feet from the cabin windows. One night I dreamed about all the Jet Rangers parked rotor to rotor at the end of the runway in Kodiak. I was standing with two five gallons buckets of gasoline and a Bic lighter. There was no fence to stop me. The beautiful machines had become carriers of the plague.

There are days when the spill seems like a very long time ago, and other times, as if it were last weekend, or even, in some strange way, like it is still happening somewhere, still in the process of arriving from just over the horizon north and east of the Barren Islands or lying outstretched in the forests of our minds where certain dappled moments of the past live brightly forever. Like all great events, the oil spill created its own weather of effect, perception, memory. Even now at this twenty five year remove, I sometimes feel a certain sensuous echo of that lost season.

In writing about the spill a few years ago, when I asked people if there was a thing they considered part of the central experience of the spill for them, they would grow quiet, pause, audibly inhale. In that pause the meaning of whatever story they were about to tell me would always come somehow before they said it, like the sound of a helicopter's rotor wash rattling a hilltop stand of birch trees before the machine itself rises into sight from the other side. I was struck with the familiarity of that time as they described it. Even when the narrative details of their memory of that summer were different from mine, we orbited the same emotional nexus.

If it is true that the images of the most intensely lived parts of our lives can reverberate and sometimes outlive us in the memory of those who knew us and heard us tell about those things, it is also true that our deepest moments of sharing and understanding come when we share those images. In those moments, when someone tells us something important about themselves, the space between our different stories and lives collapses and we share the same emotional space. When I asked people about 1989, they would pause and then tell me their story, and the underlying reality was always recognizable and familiar.

In August of that summer, our Veco coordinator downgraded Uganik Bay from "moderately oiled" to "lightly oiled." The cleanup was over. On the last contract day we skiffed back across the bay to the cabin in an evening drizzle. Streaks of sheen lay in great swathes across the water. Oily sticks and kelp and the occasional dead gull lay in the sheen. The bay was quiet, the helicopters were gone. We picked up the birds and put them in a plastic bag. Veco left us lots of those bags after they pulled out. We used them for years afterward to keep our things dry whenever we had to do the long run into town.