Remember The Eye of Hurricane Gloria Passing Over Connecticut?

Have you ever been in the eye of a hurricane? It's only happened to me once, 38 years ago today, on September 27, 1985. That was the day Hurricane Gloria passed directly over Connecticut with 80-100 MPH winds. We see it in movies all the time, but Gloria was the only time I ever experienced that brief moment of calm inside the eye of an incredibly powerful storm.

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My family lived in Waterbury when Gloria hit in 1985, we could see most of Waterbury and Middlebury from our backyard. Hurricane Gloria, according to wikipedia.com, passed directly across Western Connecticut in a Northeasterly path that started in Westport, continued across Monroe, Southbury, Newtown, across Waterbury and curving then towards Hartford.

I remember most of Connecticut shut down, no school for us kids, and most of our parents shut down due to the major highways being closed. The sheets of drenching rain, howling 60-70 MPH winds kept ramping up as Gloria closed in. We had a few white birch trees in the woods behind out house, and they started to sway and disintegrate. As Gloria's eye approached with the most intense winds over Waterbury, numerous limbs of trees started flying across our property. Brilliant flashes of electricity blinded us as transformers were crushed, and power lines snapped. It was terrifying losing power in 1985, and we lost it for over a week.

Then, for a few brief moments, the roar of wind was gone, millions of leaves caught up in the sky were drifting back down. We cautiously opened our door and creeped outside, I looked up, and it was one of the most incredible sights that I had ever seen, a tiny perfect circle of sky.

We could hear the wall coming, and in an instant the wind and intense rain tore into us from the opposite direction. We've been hit with tropical depressions and hurricanes in the 38 years since, but that was the only time most of us in Western Connecticut saw the eye of the hurricane.