81 deaths in one October night, 1954
Toronto's Worst Storms
Our general climate guide covers Toronto's normal weather. This is the abnormal side of it — a 1954 hurricane that reshaped the city's relationship to its own rivers, and a single year, 2013, that delivered a record flood and a historic ice storm five months apart.
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Our weather guide covers what a normal year in Toronto looks like. This page is about the exceptions — the storms severe enough to actually change how the city is built and governed.
Hurricane Hazel (October 1954)
The single deadliest weather event in Toronto's history. Hurricane Hazel reached the city on October 15–16, 1954, dropping enormous rainfall onto already-saturated ground and causing catastrophic flooding along the Humber River and Etobicoke Creek. It killed 81 people across the region and caused roughly $137 million in 1954 dollars in damage (well over a billion dollars today), leaving about 4,000 people homeless; 35 people died on a single street, Raymore Drive in Weston, when homes were swept away. In its aftermath, the province banned residential development along Toronto's river valleys — a direct reason so much of the ravine and river-valley system covered elsewhere in this guide is parkland today rather than housing.
The July 2013 flash flood
On July 8, 2013, Toronto recorded 126 mm of rain in a single day — the most rainfall the city had ever measured in one day, more than a typical month's worth of July rain falling in a few hours. The flooding knocked out power to over 300,000 customers and stranded roughly 1,400 GO Transit passengers on a train sitting in floodwater for hours.
The December 2013 ice storm
Just over five months later, an ice storm hit the city on December 21–22, 2013, coating trees and power lines in ice heavy enough to snap branches and topple lines across the region, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without power — some for over a week, through the days leading into Christmas. Environment Canada ranked the two 2013 Toronto storms among the top weather stories in the country that year.
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Sources
- Wikipedia — Effects of Hurricane Hazel in Canada
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Hurricane Hazel
- CBC News — A Decade Ago, Toronto Was Underwater