Toronto cleans up after severe storms cause floods

Major motorways in Toronto have reopened and clean-up efforts are underway after a string of storms flooded parts of the city, cut power and left drivers stranded.

Nearly 5,000 customers were still without power as of Wednesday morning, according to Toronto Hydro, down from 167,000 the previous day.

Environment Canada reported that almost 100mm (4in) of rain fell on Toronto on Tuesday, surpassing the city’s daily record set in 1941.

Images and videos showed severe flooding across the city, cars nearly submerged, and water cascading down the staircases at Union Station, a major transit hub.

The pop star Drake posted a video on Instagram which appears to show part of his Toronto home, “The Embassy”, submerged.

“Better be espresso martini,” he wrote as the video showed sludgy brown water fill a room.

As Toronto deals with the aftermath, city manager Paul Johnson said the focus is both on clean-up and how to rebuild the city’s aging infrastructure in a flood-resilient way – a costly undertaking that would take years to complete.

The challenge, Mr Johnson added, is doing this work while record-breaking storms continue to happen. He noted that Toronto had three 100-year storms in the last 11 years alone.

“The definition of them seems to have flown out the window,” he told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

Tuesday’s storm brought major chaos to commuters and travellers in the city.

It delayed or cancelled several flights out of Billy Bishop Airport, on the Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario.

The Don Valley Parkway (DVP), a major motorway that runs adjacent to the Don river, was blocked in both directions by flooding. Ontario Highway 410 was also closed.

Both have reopened as of Wednesday morning, with Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow saying in an interview with local news outlet CTV that things are “almost back to normal”.

Authorities said they rescued at least 14 people, including one person who had to be plucked from their car’s roof, on Tuesday.

Toronto’s fire service also received more than a thousand calls from people trapped in lifts after large areas of city centre lost power during working hours.

Meteorologists said that Tuesday’s record rainfall was due to three consecutive storms that fell on the city.

“We had 25% more rain in three hours than we’d have normally in the whole month of July with all the thunderstorms and systems that moved through,” meteorologist Dave Phillips told local news station CP24.

Mr Johnson said that parts of the city were hit with normal levels of rain, while others where deluged with “hurricane amounts of water”.

The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority warned that areas near shorelines, rivers and streams in the city are especially prone to flooding. There are more than a dozen rivers and streams in Toronto, making it vulnerable to rising water levels.

Ms Chow said she did not know why the Don Valley Parkway, which is prone to flooding, was not closed earlier in the day.

Toronto suffered from an intense and costly July storm in 2013 that left at least 300,000 people without power and more than 1,000 passengers needing rescue from a flooded train.

(Reposted from the BBC)