Mertarvik, Alaska, sits high on a treeless bluff, roughly 30 miles up the Ninglick River from the Bering Sea. On a late April day, wet, stinging snow and ominous gray clouds gave way to spots of blue sky. After school, Gibby Charles, 11, and Jonah Andy, 12, spend their time trying to perfect their handstands. “I’ve been doing this for four years — since I was 7,” said Charles as he slapped his hands down in the slushy snow and kicked his feet in the air.
The two boys giggled, then stopped and looked up at a small flock of birds soaring overhead. “We hunt them,” said Charles. “Tutangays,” said Andy, an Anglicized version of Tutangayak — “Canada goose” in Yugtun, the Central Yup’ik dialect spoken here.
The geese are a prized meal in the spring: The first fresh meat of the subsistence hunting and fishing season and a sign of warmer weather to come. The boys’ eyes followed their flight across the river toward Newtok, nine miles to the northwest. Charles and Andy, two of the nearly 200 people that live in Mertarvik, used to live over there.
For the people who still live in Newtok, Mertarvik is a beacon promising a safer, healthier future. The land in Newtok is water-logged, unstable and unlivable, and it’s been eroding into the Ninglick River for decades — an inch here, a few feet there. Then, in fall 2022, a massive storm that began as Typhoon Merbok in the Pacific Ocean devoured more than 30 feet of land between the public school and the river’s edge. The storm exacerbated problems that are forcing the community to undertake one of the country’s first climate-change driven relocation projects: a village-wide move from Newtok to Mertarvik. But federal funding for relocation is piecemeal, and the sheer complexity of constructing a whole new village in one of Alaska’s most remote corners has delayed the move, leaving most residents stuck in Newtok — even as it falls apart around them.
NEWTOK’S CRITICAL infrastructure is deteriorating. Waste disposal is a major challenge. There is no running water or functioning sewer system. The sewage lagoon was abandoned several years ago, after it was deemed an environmental hazard. Newtok’s residents use 5-gallon plastic buckets, called “honey buckets,” as toilets and dump the contents in the river, only to have waste wash back up during storms and high tides or melt out of the snow and ice in spring. Parents say that their kids have suffered from strep throat and other respiratory illnesses for years. They believe there is a direct connection between their kids’ health and the lack of sanitation.
Power poles lean precariously and, in some places, the lines drag across the ground. A 211,000-gallon tank that holds all of the freshwater for the nearly 200 people who still live in Newtok sits on a crumbling platform. “All around, it is sinking,” said Alexie Kilongak, the water plant manager. He pointed to the splitting wooden beams that hold up the tank. “It’s all rotten.”
About 200 feet away sits the school, which doubles as Newtok’s emergency evacuation shelter. It closed in January, after a fire cut off power and heat, causing the pipes to freeze and break. Between mid-April and the end of the school year in May, Newtok’s kids attended two hours of classes each day in a Catholic church with a leaky ceiling.
“All around, it is sinking. It’s all rotten.”
“We’ve got to be resilient in everything we do. Not fall apart, but keep doing what’s best. Our ancestors did this,” said Lilly Kassaiuli, 60. She said the foundation of her three-bedroom house has been sinking into the melting permafrost for years — there are wide gaps where the walls meet the ceiling — but it got worse when the remnants of Typhoon Merbok slammed into the community.
“I heard a screeching sound, a very unusual screeching,” said Kassaiuli, who wasn’t home at the time, though she was nearby. “It was the house.” She didn’t want to see for herself, fearing something terrible, she said, so she went to play bingo with friends. “The next thing, I had a call, and they said, ‘Your house just fell down.’” Kassaiuli’s daughter was home, cooking. “Poor girl, she said, ‘Mom, I am in shock.’ It must have been scary for her. I could tell by her voice it really did affect her.”
Now, Kassaiuli can’t use her bedrooms, so she draped plastic sheeting over the doorway that leads to them and duct-taped it to the walls to keep cold air from pouring into the kitchen and main living space. She could seal the gaps above the walls with spray foam, but Kassaiuli said it’s too expensive to ship cans of spray foam to Newtok. So, she stuffed the space with old socks and fabric from clothing she no longer uses. “Everything that’s not gonna be used, I recycled … clothing, everything. That’s how I recycle,” she said. Federal funding for repairs hasn’t materialized. Kassaiuli said FEMA officials looked at her house, but she hasn’t heard back from them.
IN 2016, NEWTOK Village Council President Paul Charles requested a federal disaster declaration, but FEMA denied it. According to the agency, the declaration was not appropriate, because the situation did not meet the criteria in the Stafford Act, a federal law that guides the agency in most of its disaster-response activities. The law limits FEMA’s ability to respond to “slow-onset events,” like permafrost degradation and erosion. The state of Alaska has also been reluctant to invest in repairs, denying Newtok’s request in 2017 for relocation funding. The agency in charge claimed the funding application was incomplete, a claim Newtok’s lawyer and an engineering firm involved with drafting it dispute.
In late April, a team from the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs visited and toured the community for less than an hour; a press secretary said the visit was closed to the press and declined to answer questions about its purpose. Members of the Newtok Village Council said the officials came to discuss a new $25 million dollar award announced last fall meant to help the community relocate — a sliver of the $120 million to $300 million or more that moving will cost.
The BIA uses words like “voluntary,” “community driven” and “managed retreat” to describe the relocation project. That vocabulary seems deliberate. The last time the community moved, to its current site, it was far from voluntary: In the 1950s, the BIA built a school in Newtok and told the residents of Kayalavik, an old village site nearby, that they had to send their children there. This time, the federal government isn’t forcing a move; instead, it says it’s helping.
The last time the community moved, to its current site, it was far from voluntary.
But everything about rebuilding Newtok across the river at Mertarvik is complicated. The tribal government selected the land for the new community in 2006. Despite decades of planning, it’s still incomplete. Today, there are about 30 finished houses. An emergency evacuation center doubles as a makeshift school. Small airplanes only started landing on a new runway at the top of a hill last fall. There is no store, no post office, and it could be more than a decade before the community gets running water and a functioning sewer system, although it’s in the plans. That could cost up to $35 million, though the project is marked “infeasible” in a 2022 Indian Health Service report of sanitation deficiency levels, without explanation.
Fourteen new homes in Mertarvik are slated for completion this summer, but in order to rehome everyone in Newtok, several dozen more are needed. Building them is complicated by both geography and bureaucracy. Supplies and construction materials for remote villages in Alaska arrive on a barge from Seattle, and space must be reserved several months in advance. It’s also unclear, according to the project manager in Mertarvik, whether the latest federal grant from the Interior Department can be used on housing construction, because it’s labeled as an infrastructure grant and the agency doesn’t define housing as infrastructure. Labor is also hard to come by. The project manager aims to hire locally, but the wages are low compared to other construction jobs across the state.
Lilly Kassaiuli’s family is among nearly 50 on a waitlist for a new house across the river. But, like nearly everyone on the list, Kassaiuli can’t say for sure when she’ll move. “I hear those houses over there are a little rustic, but I don’t mind. It will be better than this place, I tell you,” she said. A few of the new houses have small water tanks and composting toilets. Most use a Portable Alternative Sanitation System, which separates liquid and solid waste; one Mertarvik resident called it “a glorified honey bucket.”
The only building with a shower, running water and flush toilets is the evacuation center, which is also the school. There are already plumbing issues: The pipes have frozen and sprung leaks; in April, the sewer line was backed up, and chunks of used toilet paper and other waste spewed from the tops of two large lines that lead to a small wastewater treatment unit.
Meanwhile, in Newtok, the school district will start to demolish the back end of the school this summer. It’s a safety precaution should another large storm arrive this fall. For 22-year-old Jimmy Kassaiuli, Lilly Kassaiuli’s nephew, it’s all bittersweet. He’s lived his entire life knowing he’ll have to leave Newtok someday. “Living this life is like a new page of a book,” he said. “Moving on, I’m gonna say goodbye to ‘home sweet home’ and say hello to a new home, to a new beginning.” But when that new beginning will start is anyone’s guess.
Emily Schwing is a reporter based in Alaska. Follow @emilyschwing
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline ‘All around, it is sinking’.
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