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The Best Disaster Ever Hitting Toronto
Hurricane Hazel and the Importance of Building Restrictions
On July 16, 98 mm of rain was dumped on the already sodden Toronto within three hours. It was the city’s fifth wettest day ever (for European readers: ‘ever’ is very relative in North America — daily rainfall in Toronto has only been measured daily since the 1930s). The headlines are alarming, and total damages are estimated at 1 billion Can$, but on the next day, nearly everything was back to normal, and there were no deaths. One would like to thank human foresight and wise planning, but really, the main reason for the moderate damage is a storm, Hurricane Hazel.
Hurricane Hazel
Toronto is too far inland and too far north to be hit by hurricanes, but Hazel was an exception. Hazel hit Haiti, made landfall at the Carolinas, and then crossed the Alleghenies, picking up new energy by interaction with a cold front. The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) had already seen heavy rainfalls, and the ground was saturated when Hazel hit it on the evening of October 15, 1954. The water swelled the rivers and streams, raging against an infrastructure not built to withstand severe flooding. To make matters worse, the city had started to expand into the rivers’ floodplains, and those houses were now inundated or swept away.
Hazel killed 81 people in Southern Ontario, most of them in the area that now is Toronto (Toronto was created in 1998 by an amalgamation of the City of Toronto with the surrounding municipalities). More than 50 bridges were destroyed, roads and railways were washed out, 1,868 families in Toronto became homeless (4,000 families in all of southern Ontario), and the army had to be called in for emergency support. Total damages were estimated at 1.6 billion Dollars in today’s money.
Consequences
In a way, Hurricane Hazel struck at the right time. People were starting to encroach on the Toronto area's river valleys and flood plains. There was enough development to see severe damage and loss of life but not so much development that politicians felt pressured to maintain housing in the floodplain. The city and the province worked together and used the catastrophe to turn the most severely damaged housing areas into parks and…
