Flood, mud batter Middleburgh

7/14/2021

By Patsy Nicosia

Flood, mud batter Middleburgh

Flash flooding Sunday into Monday dumped as much as four and a half inches of rain on the hills above Middleburgh, carrying mud and debris onto Main Street and into the Middleburgh High School.
It wasn’t the Schoharie Creek this time—though that too flooded its banks and into farm fields along Route 145—but Gorge Creek at Clauverwie Road and Main Street.
Alarms and alerts started going out shortly after midnight as DOT, local crews, and Middleburgh Fire Department volunteers rolled for what would be a long day of cleaning up.
With help from friends, Rich Beal was sweeping mud out of his Main Street building Monday morning and hosing off the sidewalk, glad only a couple inches of it had gotten inside, but frustrated just the same.
“We’re always the first ones that get hit,” he said. “Usually it comes around the back…It wasn’t even the [Schoharie] Creek this time, but the tributaries.
“Mud, debris…it just plugged up everything. It’s past time to do something about this. How many times can we keep this up?”
As Mr. Beal worked, DOT and Middleburgh crews and businesses were doing the same thing across Main Street; across from Clauverwie they “vacuumed” out the culverts plugged with limbs and other debris washed down the Gorge Creek tributaries.
At the high school, trash littered the front and back lawns, mud covered the track and tennis courts; both water and mud also made their way inside. (See related story on page X.)
In the Town of Middleburgh, Brooky Hollow between Posson Hill and Cotton Hill was closed for most of the day with washed out shoulders, and the Middleburgh Fire Department’s incident report is long: a power line down on Pleasant Valley Road, car into water, rescue of two; extreme flooding on roads/road closures. Main Street. River Street. Pleasant Valley. Cotton Hill & Lower Road. Route 30…
Also: Completed search and rescues, transports of residents to homes, good intent checks, evacuation of two homes on Pleasant Valley Road, 22 basement pump-outs, two fire calls, smell of gas; one auto alarm for gas detection at MCS, flood debris removal and dust control…
Tuesday morning, Huntersland Road was closed because of a mud slide between Route 145 and Brook Hollow Road.
All told, nearly 20 volunteers responded, working more than 400 manhours.
Mayor Trish Bergan said she wouldn’t have expected anything less.
“We’re a community that always pulls together,” she said. “I can’t thank everyone enough.”
While Monday’s flooding was nothing like Hurricane Irene—10 years ago in August—or even the Christmas Day 2020 flooding, Mayor Bergan called its intensity and speed “frightening.”
“I went out about an hour before things got bad, driving around in the dark. It was high, but there was no flooding,” she said.
“But within an hour, Gorge Creek was everywhere. You talk about flash flooding…Gorge Creek just exploded.”
The Village of Middleburgh has been working to address flooding along Gorge Creek for almost a decade, but Phase 2—custom-made box culverts at Clauverwie and the high school—has been stalled by a shortfall in state funding.
That all changed in June when the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery came up with $900,000 to close the gap on the $2 million project.
Work is expected to begin next summer.
It will be a big project with detours on Clauverwie, Mayor Bergan said, but the work can’t be put off any longer.
“This flood is the perfect example of why it’s critical to get this project completed,” she said. “If only we’d been able to do this years ago—like we were supposed to. It’s frustrating. These rain events aren’t going away. So we need to address our infrastructure.”