JULY 20, 2024

Dear reader,

Countless absurd scenes took place across the city following Tuesday’s record-breaking rainfall. We saw cars floating on the Don Valley Parkway, kayakers paddling the road to Cherry Beach, water cascading down the steps at Union Station and buckets catching leaks outside Mayor Olivia Chow’s office. One of the most telling images of wrack and ruin captured muddy water rushing over the gold floors of Drake’s $100-million Bridle Path mansion; the rapper posted a video of the chaos on Instagram with the caption “This better be espresso martini.”

The climate crisis is here, and—as a post from one of the world’s richest musicians reminds us—it won’t be sparing anyone. Tuesday’s storms left 167,000 people without power, and the Toronto Fire Service received 1,700 calls for help. As we continue to take stock of the damage, Mayor Chow has said the city is “massively investing in the state of repair so that there is less flooding going forward.”

But, for anyone paying attention, the scale of the mess should come as no surprise. Back in 2019, Toronto Life writer Mark Mann investigated whether the city’s infrastructure was ready for the new era of torrential storms. The short answer: no. Today, we’re revisiting his story “Hell and High Water” to put the week’s flooding in context.

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—Madi Haslam, digital editor

Torrential storms have become the new normal. They’re turning our basements into lakes and our streets into rivers. Is Toronto ready for the age of the flood?

BY MARK MANN | MAY 23, 2019

In August of 2018, a squall—sometimes called a ghost storm or a ninja storm—tore through Toronto. It knocked out power for thousands, stalled a streetcar in an impromptu lake and inflicted $80 million in insured damage. Damage to public infrastructure was even worse. In this informative, terrifying piece, Mark Mann examined how underprepared the city’s infrastructure is for the coming floods of the world’s new climate reality. As he writes, “In 21st-century Toronto, when it rains, it floods.”

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