Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for Newtok’s relocation. Planning for the move began nearly 40 years ago. Now everyone has moved to the new village site, but they haven’t escaped a lot of the problems that contributed to a serious public health and safety crisis back in Newtok.
KYUK reporter Emily Schwing has spent the last two and a half years digging into the relocation of Newtok to Mertarvik, the money that’s been spent, and the infrastructure on both sides of the river. She sat down with KYUK News Director Sage Smiley to talk about some of her findings.
Find a transcript of the conversation below. It’s been lightly edited for clarity and flow, but may still contain transcription errors.
KYUK (Sage Smiley): Hey Emily,
Emily Schwing: Hey, Sage.
KYUK: So you've been reporting on Newtok’s relocation to Mertarvik for the past few years. Can you sum it up for us? What's the situation, and why did the community need to move in the first place?
Schwing: Yeah, so the community needed to move because the permafrost that was underneath the community was thawing out, and because of that the land started to become unstable. So when you go to Newtok, you see a lot of power poles that hold up the electricity lines are leaning at really strange angles. Some of them have actually fallen over. You'll see buildings where they're kind of sinking into the ground. Fuel tanks that are leaning to one side or another, and just a lot of indicators that things are not right, basically. You'll also notice that everything is wet. The ground is squishy. It's tundra, and so there's a lot of water everywhere. People weren't able to dispose of their own waste any longer because the sewage lagoon was decommissioned years ago. The slough that people would cross, either by boat in the summer or with a snowmachine in the winter, has filled in with sediment. So in the summertime, when it wasn't frozen, there was no way for them to get over to their dump to dispose of their garbage. So there were just a lot of things adding up to a place where it wasn't healthy or safe to live there anymore.
KYUK: So now the community has moved to Mertarvik, 9 miles across the Ninglik River, and moving a whole community is a really big endeavor. It took decades for them to move. So what's this cost?
Schwing: That's a really great question, Sage, and I did try to figure this out. The beginning of this project was really a goal for me to find out how many dollars, precisely, had been spent on this relocation. And I couldn't do it. It was really complicated. I downloaded a lot of data from a federal spending website, and all that data basically explains all the federal grants that have been used to pay for this relocation. And when you download that spreadsheet from the federal government's website, you get a couple columns of numbers: you get an obligated column, which is the amount of money that Congress approves to spend on the project, and you get an outlayed column, so outlayed means the amount of money that has actually been spent. However, I have never been able to find clarity on how different agencies report those funds over a time period. So I'm not entirely sure that the outlayed number is accurately reflected versus the obligated number. So it's just something that became really cumbersome and complicated and I couldn't get to one final dollar amount, although I have seen and been told that the price tag on this could range anywhere between $47 million and $300 million.
KYUK: So if we don't have a full picture of what the cost of this move has been, what other measures do we have? What have you been able to identify through your reporting in terms of being able to look at the successes or drawbacks of this full community relocation?
Schwing: Well, I can tell you which grant from which agency paid for which thing on the ground. I can tell you you know that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, paid for gravel pads that some housing stands on. I can tell you that the [United States] Department of Housing and Urban Development and the [U.S.] Bureau of Indian Affairs have also funded housing and different kinds of infrastructure, particularly the [U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs]; they're the largest funder. They paid for a lot of the roads in Mertarvik. So those kinds of things I can tell you, and then I can also tell you what kind of condition that infrastructure is in, right? So there are some real significant issues that have arisen from some of the projects that offer people critical infrastructure. So things like electricity: I've reported over the last two years on the increased demand for electricity in Mertarvik as people have moved over from Newtok. It was something that no one really planned for, right? As the population declined in Newtok, but increased in Mertarvik as people moved, there was going to be a bigger draw on the generators that supply power in Mertarvik, and same with this little, it's called an MBR. It's a micro bioreactor. It's like a little mobile sewage treatment facility. It's about the size of a shipping container. And as people moved over to Mertarvik, more and more of that waste was going into the MBR, whether it be from the housing where construction workers were living, or after they moved the clinic there was a lot more water and wastewater coming out of the clinic, and same with the school. As the temporary school in Mertarvik got more and more students into it, the flush toilets there were being used more. So the demand for use on that MBR also increased to the point where it actually backed up into the basement of the school.
KYUK: So it sounds like community-wide infrastructure in Mertarvik has kind of struggled with the influx of people coming from Newtok. How about individual property or individual houses? That's something you've looked at as well.
Schwing: Yeah. And that's also quite interesting. So there are a bunch of things, depending on the type of housing design, that are actually missing when you compare what's on the ground to what was proposed. And so there's three different permanent housing projects in Mertarvik. There's housing that was designed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center based in Fairbanks. There's also housing that was designed and built by the Association of Village Council Presidents, Regional Housing Authority. And then there's housing that was designed and built by a contractor who was hired by the tribe. That company is called LeMay Engineering and Consulting. And this is where things got pretty interesting for me. The proposals for the houses that were built by LeMay Engineering and Consulting are very, very different from what actually exists. So those proposals include things like – the language that they use is China water closets, but that's a flush toilet, as you and I know it – or diesel-powered washer-dryers for people to do laundry in their homes. A lot of the materials that are used for the trim around doors and windows, that material that exists today is not very durable, but also it's not what was proposed. And so I started to really look at the housing because I really wanted to know how you could write a proposal for a federal grant and then build something that's very different.
KYUK: So how exactly did you go about identifying or quantifying these housing infrastructure failings when this is people's individual homes, and to list that out requires a lot of work. What was that process like?
Schwing: Well, first of all, I just want to give a shout out to basically everyone who lives in Mertarvik. They were so gracious and generous in allowing me to walk through their homes, and crawl under their houses, and find ladders and break into their attic spaces, and in some cases, really, literally break into their spaces. Because what we found is some of this housing with the worst problems doesn't have sealed vapor barriers, so they're very wet. And when things get wet in Mertarvik, particularly with the materials used, things expand, so there's a little square in the ceiling of houses where you have to, sort of like, really punch the little trap door out because it's expanded because it's been wet for months. And what we found was, well, not only the unsealed vapor barriers, but light fixtures that were filling with water, very visible water damage in the wall paneling. So the walls inside these houses are not drywall, which would be like a common plaster that you know of. But these are wood-paneled walls, so you can really see, after they're painted white, where the water damage is coming through. And that's when I decided to find out more about whether or not these houses were inspected. The Cold Climate Housing Research Center houses were formally inspected. [Association of Village Council Presidents,] Regional Housing Authority has an internal inspection process where they make sure they're, you know, doing the things that they need to do for a quality build and a safe, healthy home. It's this last housing, the LeMay Engineering housing, that did not have formal inspections. So I hired an inspector, and he went out to Mertarvik with me. His name's Emmet Leffel, and he's an expert in doing energy ratings and evaluating cold climate housing designs, and so he compiled a report, and it's almost 200 pages, but what's not in those pages is the impacts that aren't necessarily physical. When people are living in inadequate housing, there's a mental, social, emotional, and a social impact that this move has had on people. And he told me a little bit about that.
Emmett Leffel: You know, they were excited to be moving. They were trying to be positive. But after a year, you could see the strain on these families when they were dealing with this level of issues. It's one thing for you know, ‘Okay, my floor settled. We'll get that fixed. Not a big deal.’ Now, all of a sudden I have leaks everywhere. I have water coming in. I mean, you're just, all your senses are bombarded with these, these problems. And the mental, mental impact is real. It is a real issue.
KYUK: Are the agencies or organizations that are responsible for this move and responsible for the different housing projects in Mertarvik aware of these really major housing issues?
Schwing: That's a great question. Yes, I would say they are aware, because I made them aware. I have sent our housing inspection report to [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], the [U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs], the Newtok Village Council, the attorney that represents the Newtok Village Council, and I really haven't had a whole lot of pushback, but I also haven't had a whole lot of response. The lawyer for the tribe denies that these houses are deteriorating, and rapidly, but they are, and I know that they are because I was just in Mertarvik in April, and I have documented this for two and a half years, and there's just more mold growing inside of walls. There's just more water damage. It's just moving more quickly. The gaps between the tops of the ceilings and the tops of the walls are opening up even more over time. I can also tell you that I know [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] was made aware of some problems because the Newtok Village Council submitted a funding status report that was required as part of their grant funding in 2022, and it showed that the occupancy numbers for at least two of the houses that were built with one of the grants from [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] exceeded the agency's own overcrowding standards. And the agency did not ever respond back to the tribe, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, you have too many people living in this house.’ They've also not responded to any of my specific questions about the inspection report, nor has the [U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs]. In April 2023, I was in Mertarvik and Newtok at the same time that high-ranking [U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs] officials from Washington, D.C. were in the community. I know that they toured those houses, but they never returned to make any repairs, despite having seen, you know, water filled light fixtures, water damage in walls, gaps opening up between walls and ceilings, things like that.
KYUK: So if you were to sum it up, what is the biggest takeaway of your investigation here?
Schwing: The biggest takeaway, absolutely, is that this is not an Alaska-specific problem. This is truly a national problem. Don Antrobus is a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and this is something he told me about last year after a paper he helped author was published by the consortium.
Don Antrobus: We're physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities. And while that impact is going to be different in Alaska than it is in other locations, I think our climate science indicates that we are going to see impacts, you know, throughout our country and along our coastlines, and the fact that we don't have a, you know, for lack of a better term, a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem. It's a national problem.
Schwing: His colleague also always says to me, ‘You know, if we can't move 300 or 400 people in a timely fashion and put them in safe and healthy homes, how are we ever going to be able to respond to a city the size of Miami's need to relocate because of a rising sea level?’
KYUK: So what solutions do you see in your talking to all of these experts and people in Newtok and Mertarvik? Or more broadly, looking at the plight of climate threatened communities?
Schwing: Well, all of the solutions are readily available, and the reason I say that is because there is just this enormous amount of research that includes recommendations for how to do this well and successfully that's come out over the last 20 years. And it's not just research from Alaska. There is international research. Andrea Marta Knudson is a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Icelandic Prime Minister's Office, and she's worked on relocations in Iceland and Greenland.
Andrea Marta Knudson: It's not like this is a new thing or hasn't been researched. We all know this, but when I say we all it's us who are maybe working at the ground level, like with the affected people, and sometimes we feel maybe that experts on these issues need to be working at a higher level that the government should maybe say, ‘Oh, wow, we're dealing with a disaster. Who knows about disasters?’
KYUK: How realistic do you think changes in the way that the United States approaches climate change driven relocations?
Schwing: Well, I mean, I'm hopeful, but I'm also wary. At the same time, you know, federal auditors at the Government Accountability Office have put out more than half a dozen reports that warned about the problems that I found over the last two decades. And the Biden Administration did try to address some of these concerns. They created an interagency task force led by FEMA and the [U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs], and that task force published a report with recommendations that are super similar to, you know, other recommendations we've seen from the government accountability office from [the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium]. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration took the report down after it was published. They've also frozen funding for a lot of projects like this, and that includes the money that was meant to help build more housing in Mertarvik this summer. The Trump Administration did not respond to my request for comment or specific questions about this project. And so I don't think we're in a very politically friendly climate to make change here, but I do think that essentially all the keys to this castle are available. It's not reinventing the wheel to be able to safely and successfully relocate a community that's facing really severe impacts of a changing climate.
KYUK: Thank you for your reporting Emily.
Schwing: Thanks so much.
