The , the lights went dark, the phones went down. Sirens echoed across the city as emergency calls suddenly tripled. from deluged nursing homes; firefighters wore life jackets as they extracted people from cars.
It was the “century storm”: the one-in-100-year rainfall that . Except, it hasn’t been a century since the last one. It hasn’t even been long enough to age a particularly sharp cheddar cheese.
Six summers ago, a heavy downpour half-submerged a streetcar and infamously trapped two men in an elevator as water rose to their chins. It was the last and mildest in a trilogy of floods: the 2013 storm smashed rainfall records and caused a billion dollars in damage. The 2005 storm racked up another half billion and left in Finch Ave West that could swallow an apartment building.
Century storm? A Torontonian still too young to buy liquor could have lived through four. As the city mopped up Wednesday, its top civil servant suggested the term had become meaningless. Members of the Beauty of the Don Facebook group share photos of the flora and fauna that make the Don River Valley an oasis.
But this week, the “I don’t even know why we talk about 100-year storms anymore, because that definition seems to have flown right out the window,” said Paul Johnson. Mayor Olivia Chow, echoing what many residents already suspected, was quick to blame climate change. The reality is a little more complicated, and potentially scarier.
But regardless of why Toronto is being hammered, .