HOOPER BAY -- Sixty-five miles southeast of here near the west end of Baird Inlet, an experiment began this summer to see if coastal Alaska villages threatened by erosion can be saved for something less than the hundreds of millions of dollars relocation has previously been estimated to cost.
Few in the 49th state understand better than Alaska Native leaders that new and cheaper ways must be found to help Bush communities threatened by rising ocean water levels and erosion linked to climatic warming. The federal government has long been the leader in aiding these wilderness outposts of 100 to 1,000 people, predominantly Alaska Natives.
But the tide of federal dollars that has flooded north for decades is ebbing. Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who held the raw political power to keep the cash flowing, is gone from the halls of Congress, and the nation is in the worst recession in decades, increasing the competition from other states wanting a slice of the budgetary pie from which Alaska long took a disproportionate bite.
Even funding for rural Alaska airports -- which provide a vital, sometimes lifesaving, link to the rest of Alaska -- is now coming under question.
When four Obama cabinet secretaries toured this struggling village on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River delta earlier this month, local, regional and state leaders from rural Alaska -- not to mention Sen. Mark Begich, Steven's replacement -- lobbied them aggressively on how severe the needs of the people are and how difficult the conditions here are.
Everyone out on the tundra knows federal help is vital and will remain vital for a long time to come.
But many also are beginning to recognize that projects requiring federal funding to the tune of half-a-million dollars per villager are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to sell.
While the secretaries listened to pleas here for multi-million dollar housing, education, sewage and wind-power projects, some clusters of rural Alaskans could be overheard talking about how things in the 49th state sometimes really do cost too much, about how costs are sometimes inflated, and about how there have to be better ways found to do things.
Or at least there need to be some experiments in different, cheaper ways to do things, they said. Newtok, one of the villages near the end of the Baird Inlet about 80 miles due west of the regional hub of Bethel, is slated to become one such experiment.
Newtok is eroding away and needs to be moved. The U.S. military, which has been fighting two wars in countries with little or no infrastructure, needs to train soldiers in how to move buildings and heavy equipment across un-roaded country. The two needs are meshing in the village along the Ninglick River in what the military calls an Innovative Readiness Training Program.
A 174-foot Army landing craft went ashore at Toksook Bay, about 40 miles southwest of Newtok, in late July to offload supplies for moving the village. Then, its load lightened, it headed upriver to the village itself. The LCU, as the army calls its Landing Craft Utility, has for several weeks now been ferrying supplies from the bay upriver past Newtok to Mertarvik, a relocation site. Next come the Marines. It will be their job to move Newtok, population 350, to Mertarvik, population 0, but with plans to grow quickly.
Mertarvik, about nine miles from Newtok, sits on higher ground on the treeless tundra of Nelson Island. It is also away from the eroding action of the river that has been eating its way toward Newtok at an average rate of 70 feet per year.
Once, the costs of moving Newtok to higher ground were pegged at about $180 million. Now, it is thought the move might be made for a fraction of that. The Alaska Department of Transportation is spending about $3 million to build a barge landing at Mertarvik, but most of the other work is costing nothing. The military is simply spending money it would normally spend moving dummy structures and dummy people on moving real structures and real people.
Some of the move has already begun, but the heavy lifting starts next summer when the military plans to build a road from the barge landing to site of the new town. Soldiers over the next five years will help move Newtok and build an airport and community evacuation shelter for emergencies.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has projected that everyone has about eight years to "get 'er done," as they say. It is estimated to take the Ninglick River only that long to eat its way to the village and threaten the existing habitation there.
Anna York, a reporter for "Powering a Nation," a News21 project by students of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill, was in Newtok and July and filed this report.
Craig Medred is a contributing editor at Alaska Dispatch. Contact him at info@alaskadispatch.com.