Village Mayor, Middleburgh, Schoharie County
The day after Tropical Storm Irene flood, Matthew Avitabile, a 24-year-old trustee of the village of Middleburgh, heard a rumor that the Gilboa Dam was broken.
He didn’t even put on his shoes. Barefoot, he raced out of Middleburgh’s Village Hall on Main Street and ran several blocks to his house. He bundled his teenage brother and sister into the car and drove uphill to the town cemetery, up on a high bluff overlooking the flooding Schoharie Valley.
Their father, a reporter for the Times Journal newspaper, was still down there. He was scheduled to cover a visit by Governor Andrew Cuomo to Max V. Shaul State Park, right on the river in the middle of the wide plain of the Schoharie Valley. His children couldn’t reach him, and they knew that he was nowhere near high ground.
“If the dam had broken, we might have been OK,” Avitabile said. “But my father was in a very vulnerable position. It was really, really tough. We didn’t know where my father was.”
The rumor that the dam had broken turned out to be false. The Avitabiles and their father found each other. That night, the family ate dinner in the village hall. They were joined by a mother and daughter who couldn’t get to their house and a hitchhiker that Matt Avitabile had picked up in his mad dash up the cemetery hill.
They ate spaghetti, and it felt like Thanksgiving.
In between evacuations, Avitabile was the center of Middleburgh’s recovery effort. Working the phones at the village hall, he made lists of who needed help and posted them publicly. He dispatched the volunteers who were streaming into town. He organized a series of community barbecues to feed those left homeless with the unrefrigerated food from nearby businesses. He was the one who answered the phone when Governor Cuomo called and when U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrandand U.S. Representative Paul Tonko arrived.
After the flood, Avitabile decided to run for mayor. On March 16, he won. Now, at age 25, he’s the youngest mayor in Middleburgh village history.
Where were you during the flood?
On Sunday, the day of Irene, we evacuated because we heard the dam siren. Before we evacuated, I went down to the creek and took a look, and it was bad. But I was the type of person who wouldn’t evacuate until that dam siren blew. When we heard the siren, we left within a minute. That thing is frightening; it’s like an air-raid siren.
If we had waited an hour, we couldn’t have gotten out. They blocked the road going in and out of Middleburgh. And lots of little creeks overflowed; it was difficult to get out. We spent the night in the car on Cotton Hill Road [JR]. It was really, really bad.
The first night, on Sunday, my father and I walked all the way back -- about one mile each way. I grabbed stuff like food and brought it back. And then we got up really early the next morning, and we heard that the dam was OK for the time being, but my brother and sister didn’t want to come back into town.
How did you coordinate Middleburgh’s volunteer effort?
The next day [after the storm], I was at the village hall at 8am. I knew somebody had to be there. Main Street looked like Beirut. It was like a war zone. I got a clear picture of just how bad it was. Monday, I was organizing things. I didn’t know what to do, so I got information on who needed help. Tuesday, I started sending out the volunteers. [We held an] emergency village board meeting. It was touch and go for a while. By the end of the week, it actually almost felt manageable. I had a list of volunteers. I had a list of people who needed help. I had a placard outside that said, “Who Needs Help.” The Red Cross came, [Schoharie County Community Action Program] came. I met a lot of people. We organized over 100 volunteers. That was just with the village. There were people coming in who didn’t report to us.
How has your life changed since the flood?
Running for mayor? I was probably going to do it anyway. I had my mind pretty much set on it. I’m still 25, and I think a lot of people before the flood liked me, but didn’t necessarily see me as the mayor. One of our former mayors, I asked him for support, and he said to me, “Before the flood, I thought you were a kid. And then during the flood, I saw you doing what the mayor is supposed to be doing.” I think it earned a lot of respect.
Text by Julia Reischel. Photo: Matthew Avitabile in the Middleburgh Village Hall, where he worked for weeks after Tropical Storm Irene as a village trustee. Photo by Christopher Auger-Dominguez.