Transcription
Matthew: My name is Matt Avitable I’m here on July 1st, 2024 with Clay Edmunds over here at the Bagley Annex at the Old Stone Fort. I think maybe here for a couple of these. But today I wanted to talk a little bit about a story that’s pretty near and dear to my heart. I think the best thing that I ever did, something that I enjoyed most of the time and frustrated me at others, but really made an impact. So I wanted to talk about my time as, on the village board of Middleburgh, six years as a trustee, eight years as the mayor, between 2012 and 2020.
I took office right after Hurricane Irene and served on the village board during it and realized at the time just how difficult, natural disasters can be and to get to know people who had suffered, who had struggled to bring in volunteers, to send them where they needed to be to organize different, elements, getting and making sure the people had food, making sure that people had contact information. Some people needed, shelter, some people needed, ways out of the community, especially in the couple of, in the day or two following when many of the roads were at least partially blocked. I think that experience is the one that formed me the most. So it’s going to be the one that I focus on. August 28th, 2011 is a topic that gets a lot of attention, and it’s really one that I think changed the course of the county’s history.
Of course, we had serious flooding in 1996, but this went a step above. And so my personal story, revolving around that is we knew that there was going to be a storm, but I didn’t have any idea just how bad it would be. And, I got up and traipsed down to the creek around noon. Figured it out, or went there trying to see just how high the water was getting. And some of it was lapping onto River Street in Middleburgh and came back, wasn’t sure how everything was going to go. And then the dam alarm went off. The one that warned us in case, the dam had collapsed. And so we wound up running out of the house, in about 30 seconds. I lived with my father at the time, got out and, rushed out. Me and my father and my brother and sister, I was luckily, I had the presence of mind enough to grab my wallet because we wound up spending most of the rest of the day up on Cotton Hill Road. We had attempted to get over the mountain. We really couldn’t. There were multiple blocked paths as we tried to get out of the community. Fortunately, that was a false alarm, but the fact that the dam alarm went off up and down the valley, I think, saved lives because people that normally would have stuck it, stuck it out, decided that there was too much danger and left. And I think that’s one of the major reasons why there were no fatalities during the flood.
It was an awful, awful couple of days. We wound up sleeping in the van, the minivan that my father had up at the town dump. Because it was… we knew it was going to be out of flood range no matter what happened. There was not really much else that we could do. And, we went down to the Middleburgh Diner. Luckily, I had enough cash, and we wound up getting, dinner. I had French toast. The best French toast I ever had. I think the circumstances had a lot to do with it. And the next morning, I just wasn’t sure what to see, you know, what I would see. But, in a lot of ways, the community looked a lot like some sort of war zone. I remember seeing, like, pictures of, like, Lebanon in the 1980s, and I remember seeing a collapsed storefront in what was the artisan’s gallery at the time next to the Lutheran church. And, it was extremely difficult to try and navigate it.
And so for the next two weeks, we organized volunteers. We got, some hot food out to folks. We just tried to do our best. I don’t think that the community had a flood at that scale since 1955. And without belaboring the point, I think that played a very large impact on my life and those around me. And I think in a lot of ways, one up really inspiring this sense of camaraderie that people would work together even if they didn’t like each other. It didn’t really matter about their sports or politics or anything like that. They just had to figure out how to work together. It brought a lot of opportunity in the long run, but it brought a lot of sadness in the meantime, and a lot of our friends wound up realizing they couldn’t stay and wound up leaving. So the flood itself, I think, was a major impact on our area, and I hope that it’s one that never gets repeated, although I do hope that we can learn from some of the lessons.