Toronto Slammed By Severe Flooding, 3rd Big One In 11 Years

The third huge flood in 11 years just hit Toronto
this week. 

 Severe storms seem to be hitting big cities these days. 

Power still isn't fully restored in steamy Houston yet after Hurricane Beryl roared through more than a week ago.  

Chicago is cleaning up from severe storms and tornadoes on two consecutive days Sunday and Monday. 

And now, Toronto, Canada went under water. 

Toronto on Tuesday had its fifth wettest day on record with 3.8 inches of rain, which is about what the city should see in the entire month of July, not just one day. 

Most of the Toronto rain hit Tuesday morning. The system that caused the flooding evolved into an intense line of thunderstorms that produced tornadoes in New York State, including a particularly devastating one in Rome, New York. 

In Toronto, cars along the normally busy Don Valley Parkway were covered just about to their roofs in floodwaters. The Toronto Fire Department rescued 12 people from the cars on that highway, the CBC reported. 

City officials received at least 700 calls regarding flooded basements. More than 165,000 people lost electricity. 

Several inches of water covered the floor in much of Union Station, Toronto's largest transit hub. Water also cascaded down stairways there. Trains were canceled for hours. 

The rapper Drake's Toronto mansion was among the hundreds or even thousands of flood-damaged properties. He posted a video on Instagram showing ankle deep water gushing into his home as we waded through it. "This better be Espresso Martini," he joked in the caption. 

The Toronto flood was a classic case of "training" that dangerous flash flood phenomenon I often talk about. It's those thunderstorms that line up like boxcars on railroad tracks. Repeated storms goes over the same spot. A typical thunderstorm might last 20 minutes and dump a half inch of rain. 

You get 10 of those storms right after one another and pretty soon you have five inches of rain and flooding.  The terrible flooding in Vermont last week was caused mostly by "training" thunderstorms. 

Toronto City Manager Paul Johnson said this was the city's third so-called 100 year flood in eleven years. A 100-year flood is defined as one that has a one in 100 chance of happening in a given year. 

"I don't even know why we talk about 100-year storms anymore because that definition seems to have flown right out the window," Johnson said. "The challenge is much of the city is not designed to handle this amount of water coming down."

Climate change has made torrential storms like the one that hit Toronto more likely.  The challenge Toronto's city manager cites is shared by many if not most places, including Vermont. 

Floods like the ones in Toronto and Vermont this month used to be rare, but they have become all too common. This will force some kind of reckoning as to what can be built or rebuilt where in countless communities in the world.