The village that people know as Newtok is basically a ghost town today. What’s left of the public school has been packed into more than two dozen shipping containers. It will get shipped south later this year.
No one lives in any of the houses that remain in Newtok. The only thing still operating there is the diesel generator that keeps the local cell phone tower powered.
Newtok had to move because the permafrost under the community was deteriorating. As a result, the ground was sinking and the banks of the Ninglick River were eroding rapidly – about 70 feet of land washed away each year. It’s all the result of a changing climate. And in August 2024, the Newtok Village Council voted to evacuate the last of Newtok’s residents. The community had become too dangerous.
In the fall of 2024, the final residents of Newtok moved from the low lying tundra near the Bering Sea coast to higher, safer ground on a bluff 9 miles away. It’s an effort that’s been ongoing for decades, involving several federal and state agencies, private partners, and the local tribal government.
Another move
This wasn’t the first time people who called Newtok home were forced to move. Andy Patrick, 77, is one of the oldest living residents who still remembers the old village, Kayalivik.
“One day I was probably in the sled, I don't know, probably two years old,” Patrick remembered. “I see dogs in front of me and I feel the wind. I looked back and asked my granny, and she told me, ‘We are moving.’”
When Patrick was a toddler, the United States government sent a barge loaded with construction materials up the Ninglick River. The goal was to build a school that would be operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). It got stuck near present-day Newtok, so the BIA decided to stay put and build the school there.
Even 70 years ago, Patrick said that Elders knew it wasn’t a spot that would be good for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground wasn’t stable.
“That's what my grandma used to tell me,” Patrick said. “It's going to start wobbling.”
Over the next three decades, it became clear that the Elders were right. In 1984, a consulting firm assessed erosion along the river bank on behalf of the Newtok tribe. The cover letter to the report stated: “Relocating Newtok would likely be less expensive than trying to hold back the Ninglick River.”
Just like the land, homes in Newtok were also deteriorating for many years. None of them were ever designed or built to withstand the harsh climate along the Bering Sea coast, which is known for driving wind and rain, unpredictable blizzards, and dramatic storms, particularly in the fall.
Xavier Paniyak felt the impact firsthand.
“When bad weather hits, I used to deal with it all the time. My floor always used to flood,” Paniyak said. “When I walked you could hear the water, like a squishy sound, and toward spring, when the weather started getting warm, you could smell that black mold and white mold aroma.”
A new house
Planning for this most recent move, away from Newtok, got underway in the 1990s.
One of the biggest barriers to a complete relocation has been building enough housing at the new village site, Mertarvik.
Newtok residents started moving to Mertarvik back in 2019 and continued to do so, slowly, as houses became available.
In 2024, Paniyak and his daughters finally got their turn to head across the Ninglick River. “I’m very, very, very much at home now. And this is for my kids. I’m not doing it for me,” he said.
Now, his family lives in a big blue house with a red metal roof at the end of Mertarvik’s new main road. The move has been revolutionary. His new house isn’t moldy. He’s had asthma for years, but he said that a lot of his symptoms are going away.
“Even my girls noticed I’m not grabbing for my rescue inhaler,” Paniyak said. He used Albuterol inhalers regularly back in Newtok because the mold in the walls of his old house affected his breathing. “[Now] I feel way better,” he said.
Three designs
Three different organizations have designed and built housing in Mertarvik. There are significant differences between Paniyak’s new house, built by the Association of Village Council Presidents, Regional Housing Authority, and his next door neighbor’s.
“I’m only gonna start paying when they fix this thing up,” said Philip Carl, who lives next door. His house was designed and built by an Anchorage-based company that the Newtok Village Council hired. Carl said that he stopped making payments to the tribe a few months ago because of the house’s poor condition.
Carl and his wife, Frieda, have noticed lots of problems, including water damage and gaps developing between the tops of the walls and the ceilings. There’s mold coming through the wood paneling on the ceiling, around window casings, and in the corner along the floor in one of the bedrooms. Frieda said that she does what she can to clean with bleach regularly to keep it from spreading.
Fifteen people live in her four-bedroom house. It’s less than three years old. While she said that she’s relieved her family is safe from the erosion over in Newtok, Frieda doesn’t think that her family is healthy in their new house in Mertarvik. She’s set up three air purifiers in her house to keep the air clean, but it’s not a permanent fix.
It’s not only the new houses that have problems. As the population in the new community has increased, the critical infrastructure, including water, sewage treatment, and electricity, has all been challenged in the last two years. These are all problems a move from Newtok was supposed to solve.
This reporting was supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
