#120 When A Bad Accident Happens in a Small Rural Village

Chapter One of what will be a much longer story. No one knows how it will come out.

On Tuesday, January 21, 2025 a fire consumed a half-block of businesses and apartments in the Village of Ovid, Seneca County, NY. The Village of Ovid is in the heart of the Finger Lakes wine region and is an anchor for the year-round residents and and the thousands of tourists that come to the region each year.

One attribute of life in a rural community is the lack of “redundancy.” There is one gas station; one walk-in emergency clinic; one commercial refrigeration repair technician. You rely on those individual people or places, because it is twenty miles or more to the next one.

Until Tuesday night, there was one grocery store and one diner. Now, they are ashes.

The fire started in an upstairs apartment above the grocery. An electrical charging unit over-heated. Flames spread quickly through adjacent buildings that were built eighty years ago before there were building codes to enforce.

It is a familiar story. This time, it is 21 residents of the upstairs apartments that have to find another place to stay. Sixty employees will need to find new employment in an area with a seasonal economy and a tax base that used to be industrial, but is no longer. Full-time, year-round, well-paying jobs long ago went overseas.

The were 200 fire-fighters on-site. The temperatures were in the single digits. When the water wasn’t running in the hoses, they froze. There were no casualties other than the fire-fighter whose wet gloves froze to his hands. He was in a hurry to get them off, and some of his frozen skin came off with the gloves.

The fire was an accident. The community and surrounding area has rallied quickly to contribute money and everything else that displaced residents will need to get going again. In the short term, everyone looks like they will be fine.

But is it much more difficult to build Main Street back the way it was. Money is part of the solution. Insurance will cover some of it in the short term. But in the longer-term, the people with access to the “real money” move on quickly to the next shiny new thing. Maybe it is AI. Maybe it is an entirely new military paradigm that requires scrapping manned, super-sonic fighters and replacing them with billions of drones, launched from satellites.

Sessler Wrecking, a local company now being run by the third generation of Sesslers, sent its excavators down at 3 AM while the fire was still burning, and started pushing debris to control the flames.

Communities like Ovid, NY are fragile. There is no redundancy. Before the fire, the block with the grocery and the diner and the pizza place and the laundromat were exactly like neighborhood blocks in New York City. People came and went and said hello to the guy in front of the bodega. People lived above the grocery and came down in the morning and went to work. This is how it worked when I lived in Brooklyn, NY near Court St. or 7th Avenue. Those places in a big city are not fragile. This place is.

Everyone is saying the right things now, in the days just after the fire. But what matters is what they are saying a year from now. Everyone has the right intentions now, but it will matter what those intentions will be month after month after month.