Hurricane Earl

Greenwich’s emergency operations center has four flat panel televisions and two giant projection screens.

Usually they’re tuned in to The Weather Channel and various cable news networks — Fox News Channel seems to be the preference.

The only program on this afternoon was the Yankees game versus the Toronto Blue Jays.

The Yankees won 7-3.

As Hurricane Earl weakens, a Boston hotel room special looks more and more enticing.

The first 50 people who book a room for Friday, Sept. 3 at The Back Bay Hotel will pay the dollar equivalent to Earl’s top wind speed. The luxury hotel, located on Stuart Street in the old Boston Police Department headquarters, will price the room based on the hurricane’s highest wind speed reported on Boston.com between 3 p.m. Friday and noon on Saturday.

The hurricane deal is available through the hotel’s reservation department: 617-266-7200.

Here’s what we suspected for hours: the National Weather Service has discontinued its Tropical Storm Watch for Fairfield County.

With no wind, and just a few raindrops, this comes as no surprise.

Now the NWS  is just posting a “hazardous weather advisory” that says showers are likely before midnight and winds (maybe) up to 23 mph.

The weather service is still sticking by its Tropical Storm Warning from the New Haven County border to the state line in Stonington. The farther east you go, the stronger the winds are expected to be. So they say.

Despite a few sprinkles around noon, there has been no rain in Bridgeport. Streets remain dry, tree leaves aren’t moving, and at one point there were breaks of sunshine.

At the town-owned Grass Island marine in Greenwich, about 13 boats were up on stanchions.

The water of Long Island Sound looks like a mirror, however.

Some storm….

The first major league baseball game I ever saw in person was a no-hitter.

My Dad, Daniel Cummings, took my sister Linda and me to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in September 1956 to see his beloved Philadelphia Phillies no-hit by Sal “The Barber” Maglie in a 5-0 Dodger triumph.

My first hurricane was no less memorable, and it certainly was no less impressive.

Hurricane Diane, after leaving devastation in its wake all along the East Coast, battered Connecticut on Aug. 11 and 12, 1955.

I was just 8 years old, but I can still remember the sheets of rain flying sideways, a sight I have rarely seen since (other than a few times on seaside golf courses in Ireland).

I can still picture the wind whipping the trees and my looking out the window and watching limbs and even whole trees come crashing down in our yard.

And that was just the beginning of the carnage that would be brought on by Hurricane Diane.

The torrential rains from Diane swelled brooks, streams and rivers and played a major role in the Flood of ’55 that hit the state with a vengeance in the coming days.

The flood hit several area towns hard, including New Milford, where I lived, and neighboring Washington, which lost two of its citizens when the meandering Shepaug River turned into a raging monster.

I remember going down to Bridge Street in New Milford and witnessing the biggest flood that flood-prone town had ever seen. There was water everywhere — Young’s Field was a lake, the west side of the Housatonic River was like a sea of water, and the river had widened so much it came well up Bridge Street.

My mother and father drove our family around the state in the days after the flood subsided, and I still have indelible memories of the devastation.

Washington Depot had been under water, houses had been swept away, and the bridge over the Shepaug River out on Beebrook Road was wrecked and had to be replaced.

We also went up to Winsted, which was about as hard hit as any town in Connecticut and saw the results that an angry Mad River had caused.

As an 8-year-old, I thought hurricanes and floods were just par for the course, and that they happened every summer. I soon found out that — fortunately —such was not the case.

In fact, as Mother Nature and history have transpired over the past 55 years, it turns out that Hurricane Diane was the most destructive of any hurricane in my lifetime, and the Flood of ’55 was the biggest flood to hit Connecticut in the 20th century.

I’m disappointed I have never seen another no-hitter, but I have no regrets at all that I have not witnessed another hurricane or flood like I did in the summer of ’55.

Could it be the approach of Earl? The raindrops are so few, you can easily dodge them now.
But the sunny skies of morning have given way to the clouds of afternoon in the Danbury area.

Hurricane Earl just  stopped about 120 miles off of the Jersey shore, Western Connecticut State University Weather Center meteorologist Bill Jacquemin said.

It won’t reach Connecticut until later this evening.

Residents can expect some showers and wind, “but trees won’t be crashing to the ground,” Jacquemin said.

Southeastern Connecticut will bear the brunt of the storm, which was reduced to Catagory 1.

Westchester County Airport Manager Peter Scherrer reports that flights are running on schedule.

“Pretty much, we’re operating normally,” Scherrer said. “Planes are coming in and out.”

Other than low cloud cover at the airport, it’s all systems go.

We’ll check back later with the folks at HPN, the call sign for the White Plains, N.Y., airport, which is popular with travelers from Greenwich and southwestern Connecticut.