Climate change devastated an Alaskan village, and residents are starting over in a new town

MERTARVIK, Alaska (AP) — Ashley Tom grew up on the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska. When she looked out her window after severe storms from the Bering Sea battered her town, she noticed something disturbing: The riverbank was getting closer.

It was in that house, in the village of Newtok, that Tom’s great-grandmother taught her to sew and crochet on the bench, skills she put to use in school when students made headdresses, mittens and baby booties from seal or otter fur. It was also where her grandmother taught her the intricate art of grass basket weaving and how to speak the Yupik language.

Today, erosion and melting permafrost have all but destroyed Newton, eating away about 70 feet (21.34 meters) of land each year. All that remains are a few dilapidated and largely abandoned gray houses, their paint stripped from the salt blasted in by storm winds.

“The only thing I remember about Newtok is living with my great-grandmother, and it was one of the first houses to be demolished,” Tom said.

In the coming weeks, the last 71 residents will load their belongings onto boats to relocate to Mertarvik. They will join the 230 residents who began moving in 2019. They will become one of the first Native communities in Alaska to complete a large-scale relocation due to climate change.

__

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a series on how tribes and indigenous communities are coping with and combating climate change.

___

Village leaders in Newtok began searching for a new location for the town more than two decades ago. They eventually traded their land to the federal government for a site 9 miles (14.48 kilometers) away, on the stable volcanic bedrock of Nelson Island in the Bering Strait.

But the move has been slow, leaving Newtok a divided village. Even after most residents moved to Mertarvik, the grocery store and school remained in Newtok, leaving some teachers and students separated from their families for the school year.

Calvin Tom, the tribal chief and Ashley’s uncle, called Newtok “no place to live anymore.” Erosion has tipped power poles dangerously, and one good storm this fall will knock out power for good, he said.

At the moment, hard work is being done to prepare the 18 temporary homes that arrived on a ship in Mertarvik before winter sets in.

Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average. Some towns on the usually frigid North Slope, Alaska’s vast oil patch, had their warmest temperatures on record in August, prompting some of Ashley Tom’s friends who live there to take to the Arctic Ocean beaches in bikinis.

The same story is being seen across the Arctic, with permafrost degradation destroying roads, rail lines, pipelines and buildings for 4 million people around the world, according to the Arctic Institute in Washington, D.C. In the Russian Arctic, indigenous people are being displaced into cities rather than their eroding villages, and across Scandinavia, reindeer herders are seeing the land continually change and new water bodies emerge, the institute says.

About 85 percent of Alaska’s land surface is permafrost, so called because it’s supposed to be permanently frozen ground. It holds a lot of water, and when it thaws or warmer coastal waters hit it, its melting causes further erosion. Another problem with warming: less sea ice to act as natural barriers that protect coastal communities from dangerous waves from ocean storms.

The Yupik have a word for the catastrophic threats of erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost: “usteq,” which means “surface collapse.” The changes are usually slow — until they suddenly aren’t, as when a riverbank crumbles or a giant hole opens, says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

There are 114 Alaska Native communities facing some level of infrastructure damage from erosion, flooding or melting permafrost, according to a January report from the Alaska Native Health Tribal Consortium. Six of them — Kivalina, Koyukuk, Newtok, Shaktoolik, Shishmaref and Unalakleet — were considered immediately threatened in a Government Accountability Office report more than two decades ago.

Communities have three options, depending on the severity of their situation: arrange protection so they can stay where they are; organize a controlled retreat, moving away from erosion threats; or relocate completely.

Moving is hard, starting with finding a place to go. Communities typically have to swap with the federal government, which owns about 60 percent of Alaska’s land. But Congress must approve swaps, and that’s only after negotiations that can take a long time: Newtok, for example, began pursuing the Nelson Island land in 1996 and didn’t complete it until late 2003.

“That’s way too long,” said Jackie Qatalina Schaeffer, director of planning initiatives at the Alaska Native Travel Health Consortium.

“If we look back 10 years at what’s happened in Alaska with climate change, time is up,” she said. “We need to find a better way to help communities secure land from displacement.”

Kivalina completed a master plan for the relocation last year and is currently negotiating with a regional Alaska Native organization for the land, a process that could take three to five years, Schaeffer said.

Another major hurdle is cost. Newtok has spent decades and about $160 million in today’s dollars on its relocation. Estimates to relocate Kivalina range from $100 million to $400 million and rising, and there is currently no federal funding for the relocation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has disaster funding and programs, Schaeffer said, but that comes after a disaster declaration.

In 2018, a resource for Alaska communities identified 60 federal funding sources for relocation, but only a few have been successfully used to address environmental threats, according to the Unmet Needs report. But an injection of funding into these existing programs through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act could yield benefits for threatened Alaska communities, the report said.

About $4.3 billion in 2020 dollars will be needed to limit infrastructure damage over the next 50 years, the health consortium’s report said. It called on Congress to close an $80 million annual gap by providing a single, dedicated source to help communities.

“The economic, social, and cultural livelihoods of Alaska Native people, which have served them so well for millennia, are now under extreme threat from accelerated environmental change,” the report said. “Not only buildings, but the sustainability of entire communities and cultures are at stake.”

After five years of separation and separate lives, the residents of Newtok and Mertarvik will be united again. The school in Newtok has closed, and classes began for the first time in August at a temporary location in Mertarvik. A new school building is scheduled to be completed in 2026. The Newtok supermarket recently moved to Mertarvik, and there are plans for a second supermarket and a church, Calvin Tom said.

The new village location has enormous benefits, including better health, Tom said. For now, most people in Mertarvik still use a “honey bucket” system instead of toilets. But that method of manually dumping plastic buckets of waste should be replaced by piped water and sewage in a few years. The new homes in Mertarvik are also free of the black mold that crept into some homes in Newtok from moisture brought by the remnants of Typhoon Merbok two years ago.

Tom said there is talk of eventually renaming the relocated town Newtok. Whatever the name, the move will ensure that the culture and traditions of the old site will continue. A Native drumming and dancing group practices at the temporary school, and there are plenty of opportunities to hunt elk, musk oxen, black bears and brown bears.

A group of belugas will soon be arriving each fall, and thanks to this hunt the residents can fill their freezers for the harsh winter that is coming.

Ashley Tom is excited about the arrival of the last Newtok residents in Mertarvik. Although their home will be different from what they have known for most of their lives, she is confident that they will appreciate it as much as she does.

“I really love this new area, I just feel complete here,” she said.

___

Thiessen reported from Anchorage.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental reporting receives funding from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded reporting areas at AP.org.