If you've seen the damage-on TV or maybe you walked into Middleburgh--you know recovery from Hurricane Irene is going to be a long time in coming.
"This is our Katrina," said Jim Snyder of Middleburgh Monday as he drove his pickup through mud on Danforth Avenue.
"It's a mess...It's going to take people coming up to help just like people from here went down there...
"Have you seen Grand Union?"
Or any one of dozens of downtown businesses.
Andy Jacek of Four Star Realty and a member of the Middleburgh Fire Department was out photographing properties; the Four Star and Chamber of Commerce offices on Main Street were among the hardest hit.
"See that wall? That's where my desk used to sit," Mr. Jacek said, as he volunteered a ride to survey the devastation.
Kriss Binder at Binder Auto & Truck Repair at the south end of the village, considered himself lucky.
Though a nearby stream sent a 6-8-inch layer of mud into his shop, damage there was minimal.
"It's not bad," he said, "a lot of mud and muck to clean out and we already have the backhoes clearing up the debris out front."
Like many, Mr. Binder spent Sunday keeping an eye on the flooding-but from a distance.
He said he and his son rode four-wheelers down from Cotton Hill, but couldn't get past the Cliffs to cross Route 30 because of high water and debris.
"I saw that the old bus garage was still standing and the doors on the shop were still there and we went home," he said.
"There was nothing else to do. But we got lucky."
Bill Hanson at the Mill Farm, back at the other end of the village, also considered himself lucky-even though his floral shop is likely a total loss.
"You can replace everything else," he said. "I still have my family. We're all okay."
Lost, though, are his greenhouses and his livelihood; one of his propane tanks is lodged high in a tree between Middleburgh and Schoharie, where travel and storage trailers and other debris litter flattened corn fields.
The home Mr. Hanson owns next-door to his store had a least five feet of water in it-luckily, his daughter and her family had just moved out-and his store?
The watermark outside the front window is at least eight feet high.
"I've lived through 10 floods," he said, counting them off, "...'96, '05...This is the worst.
"I just called my insurance company. The store isn't covered. That's because they told me the last time I rebuilt it they told me I built it high enough that I didn't need it. They told me '96 was a 100-year-flood..."
Between Middleburgh and Schoharie--where National Guard troops from New York City worked to keep out residents--leaking and scattered propane tanks made the village a potential battlefield-the front wall of Grand Union was knocked in, the Turtle Rock Café is destroyed, and antiques at the shop between the two are now no more than garbage.
The damage continues down Route 30 to Central Bridge and along Route 20 into Esperance.
Mr. Hanson lives in West Conesville, where he kept an eye on the Gilboa Dam-which held.
"I've never seen water go over it like that," he said.
With the waters already receding by the time even emergency traffic was allowed back into Schoharie, things there looked...OK.
But looks are deceptive, said County Treasurer Bill Cherry; he suspects none of the homes in the village are habitable.
Mr. Cherry, county treasurer, spent the night on the I-88 overpass after he helped family evacuate-and then couldn't get back into Schoharie, where he lives.
When it got light, he cleared away limbs from the Fox Creek bridge and continued downtown, where virtually every home had water five feet high.
Behind Bank of America, he and friend Kevin Marks walked into "a huge cloud of propane...it was white fog and a loud hissing. We got out of there and got to Chief [Harold] Orlup. One little spark and it would have been another Blenheim."
Not that Blenheim escaped this time.
After 160-plus years, the Blenheim Covered Bridge, is gone, washed away Sunday.
'I was there for 9/11," said Mr. Jacek, who retired upstate from the New York Police Department.
"That was worse, of course. But this is bad. You feel so helpless. It's going to take a long time to clean it all up. That's the part that feels familiar."