Safer Ground

Village of Newtok

NEWTOK - You don't need to wade through a pile of scientific studies to prove climate change is real. Just visit the village of Newtok on the banks of the Ninglia River some 500 miles die west of Anchorage. There you'll witness climate change first-hand.

The village's 360 predominantly Yup'ik residents have a problem. As the Ninglia flows west to meet the Bering Sea it's eating their community alive.

More accurately, it's eroding its banks at a rate of some 72 feet a year and at least 300 feet one year. Already below sea level and still sinking into the permafrost made unstable by climate change, the community of some 60 homes faces certain death by drowning. By 2017, the erosion will have reached all the way to the center of the village, the site of its schoolhouse. A few years later, Newtok will be underwater.

A report (https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/Portals/4/pub/Mertarvik_Relocation_Report_final.pdf) commissioned by the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development observed that the Ninglia River's 1997 "capture" of the Newtok River and its transformation into a slough has had the "most dramatic impact on the livability of the current village" exposing it directly to surges resulting from coastal storms that can raise tides up to 15 feet.

As the slough silted-up, the report continued, "commercial vessels could no longer navigate to the village" and that honey bucket waste dumped into the river that flowed out with the "with the tides" instead were trapped in the slough. Sanitation conditions in the village, an environmental health study reported, were grossly inadequate for public health and lacks access to a year round potable water source, a contained location to dump raw sewage and a reasonable access to a solid waste disposal site.

In 2009, GAO (www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-551) - the Government Accountability Office - reported that "more than 200 Native villages were affected to some degree by flooding and erosion," with 31 facing "imminent threats." Of these, GAO noted, 12 have decided that their only option is to relocate.

During his September, 2015 visit to Alaska President Obama spoke at length about climate change and its effect on Alaska communities, directing formation (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/02/fact-sheet-president-obama-announces-new-investments-combat-climate) of an interagency task force, under the direction of the Denali Commission, to insure coordinated delivery of Federal and state resources and services to affected communities, with special focus on those 12 villages.

Newtok is one of the dozen planning to relocate to safer ground. And the good news is that the resources from the Commission, the State of Alaska, FEMA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture the Bureau of Indian Affairs and others.

Most recently, at the request of the Newtok Tribal Council, HUD has awarded a $900,000 imminent threat grant through its Indian Community Development Block Grant program to relocate, in collaboration with FEMA, to relocate 12 homes determined by an engineering analysis to be structurally-sound enough to move by barge to Newtok's new site at Metarvik, the farthest point upriver that can accommodate supply barges.

Preparations should begin this building season with work completed the next. Once moved, the houses will be equipped with stand-alone water, wastewater and electric system which can be later tied into a centralized system as the community, plans are also being to developed to identify the additional resources needed to provide housing for other transplants from Newtok.

For many generations the Yup'ik visited the area around Newtok, usually in the late fall to gather berries. And now, as ice and snow caps shrink, the permafrost melts and surges rise and the sea and rivers swallow up their lands, The Guardian (www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/may/13/newtok-alaska-climate-change-refugees) calls them the "first American climate refugees." The science says they won't be the last.

It also says there are things we can do to slow, even reverse climate change. May the stories of Newtok and other small villages inspire us to make sure we do.

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