On the sixteenth day of the seventh month of 2024, the floodgates of the heavens opened. And it rained for barely three hours, but the city was submerged in chaos. Streets turned into rivers. Basements transformed into swimming pools. The stairs of Union station turned into waterfalls. And the lights went out in Toronto.
Up here in the midtown, we were spared the full destruction of the city below. Our power still went out. We were left in darkness for most of the day. No traffic lights. No local business. And the water rose here too, but not enough to flood our homes.
Just like Noah, we were warned.
We had survived the flood of 2013 and knew more would be coming. But the idea at the time was that these were once-in-100-year storms. So, we didn’t prepare until 2021, when the City started building great tunnels beneath the Midtown to swallow up the stormwaters of a distant future.
The cranes at Fairbank Memorial Park and Bert Robinson Park are the centres of construction of Fairbank Silverthorn Storm Trunk Sewer System. This project is biblical in scale: 1700 meters of new sewer tunnels, a new stormwater tunnel the size of a subway line, 15 to 40 meters underground. The rainwaters will have nowhere to go but down.
The huge tunnels will have the capacity to take up to 9,500 litres of stormwater per second and send it to Black Creek. It will save 4,645 local homes from basement flooding and save our streets from being submerged in wastewater.
But the project isn’t finished, with three years left to go. Mayor Chow recently said the federal government still hasn’t flowed the money it promised to complete it. It appears that the Trudeau government is slow in believing its own messages about climate change, and how fast those changes are hitting the country. I hope this rainstorm hit them like a bucket of cold water.
And I pray the construction will be finished before the waters flood Toronto again.
