Summer Storm in Toronto Floods Subways and Highways, Leaves 170,000 Without Power

Subway stations and highways were flooded, the newly-renovated Union Station was inundated, and nearly 170,000 households were left without power for up to 10 hours Tuesday after a summer storm dropped 84 millimetres of rain on downtown Toronto in just a few hours, the fifth-wettest day in the city’s history.

“Climate change is real,” Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow told media. “We are expecting almost a doubling of the number of severe rain storm days in 15 years. So we have to redouble our efforts to have mitigating actions, because we have to do more prevention work.”

The flash floods “brought back memories of the city’s wettest day in 2013, when an intense thunderstorm caused one of Canada’s most expensive natural disasters,” the Globe and Mail reports. “Rainwater poured into Union Station, the city’s main rail hub downtown that serves the local subway as well as Via Rail passenger service and GO Transit commuter trains, all of which had service disrupted.”

Fire crews rescued about a dozen people after parts of the Don Valley Parkway (DVP), which runs through a river valley, were shut down in early afternoon, prompting reports of cars floating along the road. One driver was rescued after her vehicle stalled on the DVP and was submerged to the windows.

“It was crazy. It’s nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” Kathy Stiliadis told the Globe. “For this to be happening in Toronto is bizarre.”

One man was rescued by military helicopter from a small island in Etobicoke Creek, in the western part of the city, CBC says.

The national broadcaster carried a full report on highway closures and transit disruptions Tuesday afternoon.

David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told CBC the storm system behind the downpour was “unique” from a meteorological standpoint.

“There was a line of storms from London to the west part of Toronto that lined up like a parade, like jumbo jets on the airport tarmac,” he said. “And there was storm on top of storm coming in one after the other, dropping their load of precipitation.”

The storms eventually unloaded 84 millimetres downtown and 98 millimetres at Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, to the northwest. “It was the intensity,” Phillips said. “We saw 30 millimetres of rain in 30 minutes. That rivals what you would see in a jungle kind of situation.”

But “this is the new reality,” he added. “It used to be river flooding, now it is urban flooding… So you end up with power outages, you end up with intersections flooded, roads flooded. It is not a surprise to see Toronto like it is.”

An expert with the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation said the storm was the latest evidence that climate change is here to stay. “These events are going to continue to increase in frequency and severity,” the Intact Centre’s director of finance and resilience, Kathryn Bakos, told CBC.

“As temperatures continue to rise, you’re going to have more moisture in the system. So with more moisture and energy, you’re going to have bigger storms, larger precipitation events, with more water coming down over shorter periods of time,” she explained. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing all across the [Greater Toronto Area] and across Canada, as well.”

Slobodan Simonovic, professor emeritus at Western University’s department of civil and environmental engineering, said Toronto has built up its own vulnerability over the years by replacing natural infrastructure like wetlands, grasslands, and forested areas with concrete roads, driveways, and buildings. “The infrastructure that we have is designed really for the historical conditions, and these events have a very different nature,” he said.

Chow said Toronto has funded new incentives for homeowners to prevent flooding on their own properties, but added that the city is C$26 billion and more than 20 years behind on infrastructure work.

“I think they’ve really recognized that they have a very big issue,” Bakos said. “Infrastructure improvements are being made, and I think they recognize that more needs to be done, as well.”

City manager Paul Johnson said staff will review how the storm progressed Tuesday and draw out lessons learned. “I don’t want people to feel we were unprepared. We were,” he told media Wednesday. “However, the situation changed significantly and when that shifted, we needed to pivot to try and ensure the safety of the folks that were caught in the storm.”

Now that the floodwaters are receding, some local residents may be “finding out the hard way” that their insurance won’t cover the damage, The Canadian Press writes.

“If you live in a flood hazard area or you’ve experienced a flood before, people might be more aware of what their insurance policy may or may not cover, and the options that are available to them,” Rob de Pruis, national director of consumer and industry relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada, told CP. “But if you’ve just moved to the area or if you’ve never experienced this before, you may or may not have this coverage.”

De Pruis said optional flood coverage is becoming more popular with Canadian homeowners, and insurers’ costs for floods and other extreme weather events are rising fast. “If we think back about 15 years ago, the insurance industry was paying out on average about $700 million a year for severe weather events,” he told CBC. In 2022 and 2023, those expenditures topped $3 billion.