Residents in Newtok have been trying to move to safer, higher ground for nearly 40 years. Climate change has dramatically altered the landscape they call home. Since 2018, 46 new permanent homes have been built for them in a new community, Mertarvik, but some residents started noticing problems after they moved into the new houses.
“It first started in the living room,” said Jack Charlie. He moved into a small, green, two-bedroom home in Mertarvik in November 2022. He said that his ceiling started dripping and his lights started to flicker. A trip through his attic revealed a big problem: an unsealed vapor barrier. A vapor barrier is a continuous wrapping that’s meant to keep moisture from building up in the walls, but if the seams between the sheets of plastic aren’t sealed, it won’t work.
Charlie’s old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed. He was excited when he got to move into his new house in Mertarvik, but that excitement turned into disappointment within six months.
“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said, ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build me?’” Charlie explained.
Charlie stuffed toilet paper into cracks opening between the tops of his walls and the ceiling to soak up the moisture and keep out the persistent coastal winds coming from the nearby Bering Sea.
The money to build Charlie’s house and a few others came from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
When KYUK asked for inspection reports for the houses, the Newtok Village Council and federal agencies said that they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired Emmett Leffel, an expert with more than 15 years of experience in cold climate housing design and energy ratings, to take a look.
The first 14 families moved from Newtok into brand new homes in Mertarvik in 2019. Those homes were designed by the Fairbanks-based Cold Climate Housing Research Center. They were professionally inspected before residents moved in.
Another 15 houses were designed and built by the Association of Village Council Presidents, Regional Housing Authority – that organization said that it has an internal inspection process.
The third type of permanent housing in Mertarvik was designed and built by Anchorage-based Lemay Engineering and Consulting. The tribe hired the company’s founder and owner, Patrick LeMay, to do the work.
There's also a number of temporary tiny homes meant as interim housing in Mertarvik, which weren't in the community when Leffel did his inspection.
When LeMay was hired by the Newtok Village Council to build houses in Mertarvik, he was also working for the tribe as an employee. LeMay did not respond to multiple requests for comment or specific questions about his housing design or its construction. But he did tell KYUK in 2021 that he intended to have formal inspections done.
“We're gonna get these houses tested, we're gonna get them energy rated. I've got a contract,” LeMay told former KYUK reporter Greg Kim. “I'm actually paying for that to be done since it's my design. It's my word that I have to prove,” he said.
At the time, LeMay said that he could build a house with an energy rating that exceeded five stars for a fraction of the cost of a house based on either of the other two designs. He said that he was taking a big risk.
“Of course since it's my guy, he's actually going to look at my building design and actually look at my products and houses going forward,” LeMay said.
Leffel, the inspector, spent just under a week in Mertarvik. He formally inspected seven homes and evaluated parts of several others.
The houses designed and built by the Cold Climate Housing Research Center and the Association of Village Council Presidents, Regional Housing Authority received high marks from Leffel’s formal inspections, although he did also make a few recommendations for repairs and upgrades.
Four of the seven homes that Leffel looked over in Mertarvik were designed and built by LeMay. In his final report, Leffel expressed concerns about the foundations of those homes, writing that they “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports,” or “structural integrity requirements.”
“The foundations were under-built and need to be replaced,” Leffel said of LeMay’s housing. “That’s major by itself,” he said. “Beyond that, we look at the building envelope aspects of it. The vapor barrier system has to be completely redone on the ceiling and the walls and so that requires a deep retrofit.”
Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows that residents in LeMay homes pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared to the other two housing projects. In short, Leffel said, they don’t qualify for the energy rating LeMay promised.
Leffel said that it’s likely that repairs and retrofits that the LeMay housing will require to keep them livable in the long-term will cost more than the original construction.
This reporting was supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Reporting.
