Erosion threatens Alaska villages

NEWTOK, Alaska – The last time chronic flooding forced this tiny Alaska village to relocate, sled dogs pulled the old church to its new home three miles away, far from the raging Ninglick River.

That was in 1950 and life was simpler in Newtok, mostly a collection of traditional sod dwellings. Modern structures gradually took over the new site as the river again crept to the edge of the Yupik Eskimo community. Persistent erosion has eaten an average of 70 feet of bank a year and now melting permafrost is subsiding, further subjecting the village to severe flooding from intensifying storms.

“This place is sinking,” said Joseph Tommy, 48, who was born in Newtok. “If the erosion keeps on coming, we will be in a grave situation.”

So once again, Newtok must move, leaving residents and officials grappling with an unprecedented crisis that looms over scores of native villages along Alaska’s increasingly battered western coast.

These once-nomadic people can no longer pack up and go. The crucial difference this time: finding the funds to move and to replace millions of public dollars invested in schools, clinics and government offices. Replacement costs are beyond the reach of these remote, cash-strapped communities that typically rely on subsistence foods for economic survival – costs that no single federal or state entity is equipped to shoulder.

“We’ve become complicated with the rest of the world,” Nick Tom, Newtok’s former tribal administrator, said as he led visitors through mud and snow, pointing out shifting houses and the crumbled soil fringing the Ninglick. “We can’t even move an inch without any money.”

It’s a dilemma taking on a new urgency as the effects of climate change escalate in a region many consider a harbinger of global warming. Erosion and flooding are nothing new here, but communities are increasingly vulnerable to melting permafrost and shorter periods of the shorefast ice that historically protected them from powerful storms.

Erosion and flooding affect 86 percent – or 184 – of 213 Alaska native villages to some degree, according to a 2003 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is trying to determine which communities need the most help from a network of state and federal agencies.

“When there is a problem that develops over years and decades, such as Alaskan erosion, the perception of urgency is not as acute,” said Bruce Sexauer, a senior planner with the corps. “The impacts of a hurricane can be felt nationwide, whereas similar situations in remote communities are oftentimes only known by a select few.”

Newtok and two other western Alaska villages, Shishmaref and Kivalina, face the shortest life spans at their current locations.

Some officials believe conditions are most urgent in Newtok, tightly wedged between two rivers. The vast, rushing Ninglick has cut into the smaller Newtok River, turning it into a slough. This is the historical sewage dumping place for Newtok’s 315 residents, who have no indoor plumbing and use buckets as toilets.

Compounding the problem, fall storms send floodwaters surging through the Ninglick and up the Newtok, turning the village into an island, said Brenda Kerr, the corps’ Newtok planner.

“The water is scary enough in and of itself, and then you consider what’s in it. The public health concern is probably one of the biggest triggers here,” Kerr said.

Newtok is ahead of other villages facing impending moves, having completed a federal land trade in 2004 for a hilly area called Mertarvik on Nelson Island nine miles to the south. But that’s just on paper. The Corps of Engineers estimates that moving would cost as much as $130 million, or more than $412,000 per resident. That price tag reflects the challenge of carrying some existing structures and tons of construction supplies to undeveloped tundra to build a community from the ground up.

“The land swap was successful. It’s the move that will cost us money,” said Stanley Tom, Newtok’s acting tribal administrator and Nick Tom’s brother.

About 370 miles to the north, the relocation cost would be even steeper for Shishmaref, an Inupiat Eskimo village of 600 located on a narrow island just north of the Bering Strait. Estimates run as high as $200 million to start from scratch with new infrastructure – or about half that amount to move residents to the coastal hub towns of Nome or Kotzebue.

Ultimately, multimillion-dollar projects to protect or move a few isolated people must be justified, especially post-Katrina. But it is not the government’s role to bankroll the entire cost of building a new community, officials said.

“I think there’s very little likelihood that the federal government or the state government could come up with $150 million to say, ‘OK, Shishmaref or Newtok or Kivalina, we’re going to move you next year,’ ” said Gary Brown, with the state’s emergency management office. “When you look at the numbers it’s kind of staggering, but if a community can figure out a way through the maze of political processes to do it incrementally, it might be more palatable.”

Joining another community is unacceptable, said Shishmaref village transportation planner Tony Weyiouanna, who has lobbied hard for state and federal funding. In their nomadic past, natives generally stayed within a certain region. Today they hunt the same animals as their ancestors, create their artwork with the same materials, know the land intimately.

Being absorbed into another culture, even one only 100 miles away, could amount to cultural death, exposing residents to urban ills including alcohol, which is banned in Shishmaref and other dry villages. Residents fear the subsistence lifestyle their traditions and economy so heavily rely on would fall off, pushing them to welfare.

“We would like to keep our traditions and values as long as we can for the future of our children and grandchildren,” Weyiouanna said.