A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.
Late in 2024, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.
Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik, but much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets, and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.
Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say that what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. It also highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica, and KYUK Public Media in Bethel, Alaska.
Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.
Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Department of the Interior. The task force’s report in December 2024 also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government, as well as long-term funding for relocations.
The Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions of dollars in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC). “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”
Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.
For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer, and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) built the school there.
At the time, Elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.
“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” Patrick said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.
Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed. But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.
“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” Charlie said.
Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said that they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.
According to the inspection performed in 2024, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.
“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.
Leffel's inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”
There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads, but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, ANTHC, and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik have a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.
As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic, and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. In the spring of 2024, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.
The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it is working closely with the Newtok Village Council, and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “[Newtok Village Council] does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”
That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said that they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said that the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said that the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.
Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”
Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said that the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.
“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”
Mead said that the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.
“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”
In 1996, after decades of fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.
Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.
“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” Knudsen said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”
Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.
The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016, but ceded control to the BIA in 2022 after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.
The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose, and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.
According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows that residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.
Francis Tom, the council member, said that outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”
A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said that its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said that multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said that no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.
HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.
In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said that they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said that the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.
Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said that winds bring water into her house.
“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” Kilongak said.
With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls. Like most people in these houses, he said that he hopes they’ll be fixed, but that he’s unsure where to turn.
“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” Charlie said.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK.
This story was co-published with The Washington Post and is not subject to our Creative Commons license.
