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Remembering Hurricane Hazel
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Local residents recall high winds and flooding
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| By Tom G. Kernaghan |
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Fifty years ago on the morning of October 16, Torontonians awoke to the
inconceivable: their city ravaged by a hurricane. Hazel had left 81 people dead, thousands
homeless, and a city in shock.
After three days of rain, many went to bed on the night of Oct. 15, 1954 convinced they
were in for another safe but soggy night. Hurricane Hazel had wreaked havoc in the Caribbean
and Carolina, but here in Toronto, where hurricanes were nothing to fear, Hazel was already
old news. Misled by this cozy belief, which was supported by low-key weather reports, most
expected Hazel to lose punch around the Allegheny Mountains before turning eastward.
They we were wrong. Worse, they were unprepared.
Hazel pushed past New York and crossed Lake Ontario. As it reached the north shore it
collided with strong cold front, saturating an unsuspecting Toronto. With awesome force,
the hurricane’s 72-mile-per-hour gusts and billions of gallons of rain turned full rivers
into raging torrents that washed out bridges, undercut asphalt, tossed large vehicles,
submerged buildings, and killed with mind-boggling swiftness. It changed our landscape,
and inflicted $25 million in damage.
“Trees and hydro lines were down,” recalls Toronto author Anne Dublin, who grew up on
Manning Avenue and wrote about the hurricane in Written in the Wind, her novel for young
adolescents. “There were strong winds and rain. All over the place [were] branches, lawn
furniture, garbage cans…. We were all terrified. Toronto had never been subjected to this
kind of weather before. We were shocked and surprised. The weather reports had been mild.
No one was prepared.”
Local architect Paul Martel, chair of the Annex Residents Association’s parks and trees
committee, also remembers that night.
“I was alive in 1954, a high school student, and have vivid memories of Hazel in the
city I lived in, with flooded streets, mud and debris everywhere, and torrential endless
rains driven by gale force winds,” he says. “It was both awesome and terrifying.”
For all Hazel’s fury, however, flooding and devastation in the Annex was not nearly as
bad as it was along the watersheds of the Humber, Don and Rouge rivers, where people
lived on exposed floodplains.
“As far as I recall the local damage was not as great as in the flood plains and
watercourses outside the downtown,” says Martel, “Open watercourses need some
interceptory vegetation, plants and trees, on their banks to mitigate and temper the
volume of water in extreme conditions such as a violent storm and rainfall.”
Marty Wiener of Wiener’s Home Hardware was born just after Hazel.
“Everything in the basement was on pallets after that,” he recalls of his family’s
Wilson Avenue and Bathurst Street home. “I can remember a four-foot-high water mark
in the basement.” There was, however, no lasting damage to the Bloor Street store his
great-grandfather opened in 1924, even though the Annex sits on three old waterways
(Garrison, Taddle, and Castle Frank creeks) that used to flow aboveground, down to
Lake Ontario.
The city buried and converted the creeks years ago, and Martel says it’s interesting
to speculate what would have happened had they remained aboveground.
“Perhaps if we had the open Taddle Creek and Castle Frank Creek and Garrison Creek
watercourses flowing in their natural state, the urban development patterns and city
planning grids would have been quite different from the as-built solutions,” says the
architect; “then we would have had the water from Hazel's deluge really flowing down
those creeks.”
One lasting impact of the storm was the 1957 unification of four existing conservation
authorities that formed the Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority,
now the Toronto and Region Conservation.
Motivated by core principles of public safety, education, and action, the conservation
authority studied flood control, purchased floodplains, cultivated our vast parklands,
and shared their knowledge with policymakers and the public to help prevent floods in
the future.
(News section – The Annex Gleaner – October 2004 issue)
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