A severe thunderstorm caused flash flooding in Toronto, cutting power to at least 300,000 in Canada’s largest city, shutting down subways, and leaving about 1,400 passengers stranded for hours on a commuter train filled with gushing water.
Environment Canada said some parts of the city had been drenched with more than 100mm of rain in the Monday evening storm, easily beating the previous one-day rainfall record of 360mm in 2008.
Toronto police and firefighters used small inflatable boats to rescue commuters from a 10-car, double-decker train that stalled in floodwaters that reached up to the lower windows.
Photo: Reuter
Murky brown water spilled through the bottom floor of the carriages, sending passengers fleeing to the upper decks. A Metrolinx spokeswoman said power was shut off and the windows were cranked opened to provide ventilation.
The train was carrying about 1,400 passengers during the Monday evening rush hour.
“There’s a full-on river on either side of us... We. Are. Stuck. Hard,” passenger Jonah Cait wrote on Twitter.
Another passenger told the TV news network CP24 that she could see people clinging to trees after abandoning their cars on a flooded highway alongside the tracks.
Police and firefighters used inflatable boats to ferry all 1,400 passengers to higher ground.
It took until about 12:30am to complete the rescue operation, about seven hours after it began. Emergency officials said five or six people were treated at the scene for minor injuries, but no one required hospitalization.
Go Transit early yesterday said hat the storm had left portions of track “completely under water” on several lines.
It said the extent of the damage to the tracks was not yet known, but expected the morning’s service to “be impacted” and suggested passengers seek alternative ways to travel.
The storm left the downtown core dotted with abandoned vehicles, some sitting in water up to their windows. One woman, in a T-shirt and shorts, dove head-first through the window of her marooned car before wading away in the thigh-deep currents.
As many as 300,000 Toronto Hydro customers lost power. Toronto Hydro said about 100,000 customers were still without electricity as of 2am yesterday. The utility could not say when it expected full power to be restored
Another utility, Enersource, said power was cut to about 80 percent of Mississauga, a suburb of 700,000 west of Toronto. By around 10pm, only about 50,000 were without power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema