The Bering Sea is legendary for its fierce fall storms. But Frieda Carl, 63, said that what isn’t in the historic record are stories about storms that compare to Typhoon Merbok.
When Frieda was 12, her family moved from Tununak 50 miles north to Newtok. She said that her grandfather told her stories all the time, but none of them ever mentioned any storms that compare to the remnants of Typhoon Merbok.
“Merbok is a different one. It’s the strongest one to me,” Frieda said.
There is one story about a girl who played outside with a doll. When the breeze made contact with the doll, it grew angry. The result was a year-long winter storm. It’s an old story with few details. It’s unclear if it’s written down anywhere. Even if it is, people in Newtok said that it’s unlikely it would align with what Frieda experienced in September 2022.
“I was there when it happened and I was really worried about my kids, but they all survived, they did good. They went to the highest, they went to the school. The whole town went to the school,” Frieda said.
More than three decades ago, Newtok started to sink into the tundra. The permafrost has been melting as the climate warms, and because the ground doesn’t freeze as it used to, the village is eroding into the Ninglick River.
For just as long, the community has been working to move 9 miles across the river to a new subdivision: Mertarvik.
This fall, at least half a dozen families moved across the river, but at least 100 more residents are still waiting for homes. It has been a slow process, but Typhoon Merbok may have sped that up.
In the year since the storm, critical infrastructure in Newtok has continued to deteriorate rapidly. Merbok’s flood waters inundated a tank farm, and the Alaska National Guard responded to the resulting fuel spill in the days immediately after the storm. A year later, those tanks seem to be tipping at even more of an angle. They hold all of the fuel and heating oil the community relies on for transportation and in-home heating.
Not a single power pole in the community stands straight, and the power lines they hold up hang so low that residents have to duck to walk under them or, when enough snow piles up, step over the lines to get by. The power plant is also leaning precariously.
Frieda’s husband, Phillip Carl, is Newtok’s Tribal Administrator.
“We’ve been trying to have that other generator running, and there’s still a lot of issues that need to be solved,” Phillip said.
Although the main generator grumbles and growls, Phillip believes that it's running well. It powers everything in the community: dozens of homes, the health clinic, and two local stores. Newtok doesn’t have a backup generator large enough to serve the village if the main one goes down.
“If our generator breaks for a couple of weeks, everything will freeze. There’s no other generator we can use,” said Phillip.
Fifty feet away from the generator house, things are much worse at the water plant, which is more than four decades old.
A 211,000 gallon tank that holds the community’s water rests on a rotten wooden platform that’s caving in. The insulation in the walls of the building has disintegrated. Water plant operator Alexie Kilongak said that this winter could be complicated. He’s already had to cut off public access to showers, a flushing toilet, and the washing machines at the water plant because outflow pipes aren’t insulated and have been freezing up throughout the fall.
Newtok’s winter average temperatures range between about two and 19 degrees above zero Fahrenheit, but it’s not rare to get down to subzero temperatures.
“If it gets below minus 20, then we’ll have a hard time keeping this place thawed,” Kilongak said.
According to Kilongak and members of the Newtok Village Council, the tribe used to fund the maintenance and Kilongak’s regular salary through revenue it made from bingo. But the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to regular bingo games more than three years ago.
“All of this is crumbling and it’s just hard to keep it going. It’s just crumbling. It gets worse and worse every year,” Kilongak said. There’s no alternative plan. “‘Cause where we get water from is all frozen. There’s no way to make water, we have no well.”
Even the water that’s treated at the plant has problems, thanks to Typhoon Merbok. Last fall, the storm surge partially flooded the pond where Kilongak draws the water he treats every day with salty water from the Bering Sea.
“It got salt in it and that stressed me out,” Kilongak said. “I couldn’t stop making water because we had to think about households. How we’re gonna keep our clothes clean, and do laundry, do dishes and keep the house clean, and we need water for that,” he explained.
At least one family is hauling their water for drinking from Mertarvik, but the river is not navigable by boat this time of year as it begins to freeze up. People can’t use their snowmachines for the crossing yet either.
Kilongak and Philip said that people also pack ice on sleds in the winter from a small pond that’s about a mile away. They melt it in 50 gallon trash cans inside their homes.
In Newtok, there simply isn’t a lot of infrastructure that wasn’t impacted by Merbok.
The house 77-year-old Andy Patrick used to live in is among four that were seriously damaged. His was rendered entirely unlivable.
“The whole house flooded,” Patrick said.
He said that what kept high water from carrying away the whole building was the electrical grounding wire.
“Almost like a guitar string,” Patrick said.
In early November 2023, a Newtok resident emailed state and tribal officials at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, and the State of Alaska’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management outlining concerns about the availability of drinking water in the community.
Most responded in that email chain saying that they could help if something went wrong, but none of the agencies would provide further details on a response plan if the water plant or the community’s generator becomes inoperable.
This reporting was supported by a grant from the Center for Rural Strategies and Grist.
