Dan's Papers - August 10, 2007 - Weather Center Exec Fired

Bob Page, the recently hired director of the Hamptons Weather Center, was dismissed Monday for failing to provide acceptable weather during the weekends this summer.

The announcement was made by Alan Sachs, the Hamptons Town Manager, in a statement released to the press this morning.

"We'd had great expectations for Mr. Page," Sachs said.

"The whole community was excited when we hired him away from his Palm Beach post this March. And yet, after six rainy weekends in the past seven weeks, we simply have no choice."

Page had directed the weather center in the Palm Beach area for seven years and came to the Hamptons with great recommendations. At $102,000 per year, the job of Weather

Director is the most highly paid in this community.

Dan's Papers spoke to Mr. Page at the Hamptons Weather Center in Water Mill on Monday afternoon, and Mr. Page said he fully expected that he would be dismissed.

"I just never got a proper handle on it," he said. "We were getting thunderstorms in from Rhode Island, a heat spell in from New York City, mist and fog from up the Jersey coast.

Making the proper adjustments here at the factory is what I am supposed to do, and yet, this situation is far more complex than the one I am used to in Palm Beach. I make no excuses. The choice of data I entered into the computer was faulty and so faulty instructions ensued. The men down in the pits working the boilers did everything I told them. It just didn't work out."

Mr. Page did say that he had given it his best, had worked a twelve-hour day when he saw things were starting to go wrong, and then even moved a cot into his office so he could monitor the situation twenty four hours a day.

According to Sachs, the Council voted for the dismissal at their regular Monday meeting after rains fell on the weekend of August 8-9, a vicious thunderstorm rocked the area on the afternoon of August 11, and then the heavens opened up again on August 15-16.

"It was unanimous," Sachs said.

The Hamptons weather center was built twenty years ago with a specific mandate to try to provide weather appropriate for tourism and commerce. The ideal would be to have a forecast on Thursday of a hot weekend, sun all day Friday to get them out, rain on Saturday morning to force everybody into town to go shopping, then hot sunny beach weather Saturday late afternoon and all day Sunday for the art gallery openings, cocktail parties and other assorted benefits. There was to be less of an attempt to modify the weather during the week or out of season, other than to keep catastrophic storms from hitting the area.

Page and the other Weather Center Directors before him have a whole fleet of cloud seeding aircraft at their disposal, also two huge factories that can generate varying amounts of heat or wind. In recent years, a state of the art computer system has been installed to coordinate the operation. Other such centers have been opened in recently in Palm Beach, Newport, Cape Cod and, most recently, in Atlantic City.

Mr. Page says he does not know what his future plans may be. Until a replacement is named, the Weather Center will be supervised by assistant director Helmut Mudge, the noted computer scientist from Yale and second in command here.