There was nothing soft about the soft opening of Middleburgh’s Shelter Building Thursday.
First, the 130 chairs arrived six hours late with the tables…nowhere.
Then, about an hour into the first Town of Middleburgh meeting in the new FEMA-funded facility, one that came after quick tours for Village of Middleburgh reps and 2020’s joint town-village meeting (see related story) Clerk Brenda Lawyer’s phone rang:
There was a suspected gas leak in the Town of Gilboa and people were being evacuated; some were headed to Middleburgh’s shelter.
Supervisor Wes Laraway and councilmen kept working through their meeting while stepping outside to take and make phone calls to Mike Hartzel, the county’s Office of Emergency Services director, and others, piecing together as many details as they could.
According to OES and the Schoharie County Sheriff’s Office, residents in the Town of Gilboa called 911 at about 7:30pm Thursday after smelling propane and seeing heavy fog along the ground near Keyserkill Road.
Arriving at the scene, first responders could also smell the propane—which is highly flammable and the cause of the March 1990 Blenheim gas explosion that killed two people and destroyed eight homes--and feared a leak in the Enterprise TE Products Pipeline.
That stretch of the line, however, doesn’t have any smell, they said, but to be safe, they went door-to-door evacuating about 50 people, some of whom went to Middleburgh, while others stayed with family or friends.
Volunteers also spent several hours going door-to-door with gas detection meters before clearing the site at about midnight and telling people it was safe to go home.
The pipeline remained shut down as Enterprise TE continued monitoring the line, but said Friday they’d detected no leak and no drop in pressure indicating one.
In August 2010, about 25 people were evacuated from their homes, also near the intersection of Keyserkill and Stone Store roads at the Gilboa-Broome line because of a gas leak in the line, which had been damaged during digging and excavation nearby earlier in the month.
In Middleburgh, OES delivered a trailer of cots while waiting to see how many evacuees would arrive and volunteers went for bottled water.
“It was a good trial, I guess,” Mr. Laraway said afterwards. “It wasn’t one we expected, but we were ready.”