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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion