By the end of this month, the Newtok Village Council hopes no one will be living in Newtok, where a full relocation effort has been underway for more than three decades.
Residents there will tell you their village has seen better days. The power poles are leaning at precarious angles, buildings are sinking into the tundra, and lots of garbage has piled up around town.
High tides from the nearby Ningliq River have deposited too much sediment in the slough that separates Newtok from its dump. The muck in the slough is so waterlogged that no one can cross it on foot.
“Every summer the trash piles up at that dock, every summer,” said Dominic Charles, who was born and raised in Newtok.
“The only time we can take care of garbage is like freeze up time, and we take it across by snowmachine,” 53-year-old Charles explained. Until then, people pile their trash up on a few old docks next to a shallow slough.
“We don’t have a boat to take care of trash,” Charles said. “(We) clear it up at freeze up time, next summer it piles up again.”
This is not a new problem in the Bering Sea coastal community. State records show that the Alaska Legislature first offered the community funding to assist with erosion control back in 1983. Since then, hundreds of feet of land have disappeared into the river. In addition to the erosion, deteriorating permafrost means that the community’s critical infrastructure is at imminent risk of failure. That includes the fuel tanks that hold heating fuel for the community, the power plant, and the water plant.
At the end of August, the Newtok Village Council held a public meeting. They declared a public safety emergency and mandated “the evacuation, decommissioning, and shutdown of Newtok townsite.”
Council members unanimously passed a resolution to shut down Newtok permanently.
According to the resolution, “all public services and utilities in Newtok must be terminated, decommissioned and shut down including Newtok power plant and electric generation facilities.”
People started moving 9 miles across the Ningliq River to the new village site at Mertarvik in 2019. Housing at the new site has been the single greatest hurdle to completing a full relocation of all Newtok residents. There’s still not enough permanent housing for everyone in Mertarvik. So this fall, the remaining 88 residents who still live in Newtok will move into temporary tiny homes that arrived on a barge in September.
Although the planning, development, and construction of Mertarvik has been in the works for decades, the relocation hasn’t kept up with mounting public health and safety risks in Newtok. And the entire effort has cost millions in state and federal funding.
It’s also become prohibitively expensive for the local tribal government. When people started moving from Newtok five years ago, the community was split in two and the Newtok Village Council has been paying to operate and maintain twice the critical infrastructure their annual budget can handle: two power plants, two offices, two washeterias.
Albertina Charles, an Elder in the community, said that what Newtok residents had to leave behind is invaluable. “If only it was like a puzzle… like the erosion… we would maybe, like, put them back,” she said.
Albertina was one of the first people to move across the river to Mertarvik back in 2019. The house she used to live in over in Newtok is entirely gone and so is the land it once stood on, consumed by severe erosion along a riverbank. But she still has mixed feelings about relocation.
“Ever since I moved here I’ve been lonely,” Albertina shared in a social media post this summer. “I’m always trying to enjoy life. I miss visiting my friends, I miss activities. If only there was no erosion. I miss the tundra,” she wrote.
Albertina sat on a loveseat in her living room earlier this fall and talked about her heartache. “I’ve been lonely and even moving over here, it’s not helping,” she said as she reminisced about life back in Newtok. “It’s so different (in Mertarvik). Like, in Niuqtag (sic), you can see far, far, far away, no trees, no nothing. Just far away. And here, when you go out, you will see hill up there, hill across there, hill over there (…)” There’s not as much open space in Mertarvik, she said.
“I remember when we were young, we used to walk to the Ningliq River about an hour and a half walk down there,” Albertina recalled. Today in Newtok, the back end of a public school sits right at the river’s edge and a half a dozen homes have already been swallowed by the disappearing river bank. “When I was very young, Newtok used to be clean. No trash, nothing,” said Albertina.
With the threat of severe fall storms and colder months looming, the tribal council decided it was not only too expensive, but too unsafe for residents to spend another winter in Newtok. So in late September 2024, the last barge of the season passed Newtok on its way to Mertarvik, stacked with 18 tiny houses: temporary dwellings for people who still remain in Newtok.
Every day, when the morning fog lifts and the sky is clear, Albertina looks out her kitchen window. She can see Newtok, 9 miles back across the river. “The good news is we’re on safe, safe part (…) But I wish it never eroded,” she said.
For people in Mertarvik and Newtok, it’s hard to look forward and backward at the same time.
