Toronto battles with extreme weather and climate change

A balcony view of Toronto during the ice storm of 2013.

Anika Syeda was rinsing off in the shower during the evening on a cold December day. Suddenly, the electricity went out completely.

Petrified, she blindly jumped out of her dark bathroom shower and nearly tripped and smacked her face into a tile.

The ice storm of 2013 had hit Toronto. And it hit hard.

Power lines and trees were knocked down, people were running around not knowing what to do, and the sky was a weird eerie blue.

“It looked like something out of a film,” Syeda said.

In total, at the height of the storm, about 300,000 Torontonians were left in the dark.

The ice storm hit only months after the storm and flash flooding of July 8, 2013. On that day, Toronto was caught in a deluge of rain. According to Environment Canada, 126 mm of rain was recorded at Toronto Pearson International Airport, setting an all-time one-day rainfall record.

The massive downpour soaked the city, leaving people’s basements flooded, cars became boats, a GO train was stranded with 1,400 passengers aboard, and there were massive power outages across the GTA.

In total, the two events cost the City of Toronto more than $171 million, according to a January 2014 report from the city manager. “Scientifically you cannot [state] the fact that one deluge of water can be tied to climate change but research internationally and [through City of Toronto reports] as well, sort of indicate that we’re going to be seeing more extreme weather and that will have impacts on a range of physical and social infrastructure,” said Steward Dutfield, a resilience project leader for the City of Toronto.

According to a 2011 City of Toronto study, Toronto will be facing more extreme weather conditions.

“For the last 100 years, we designed our infrastructure and our social services and our responses to different events based on climate normals,” Dutfield said. “So now we have to re-evaluate how we design, build, construct, operationalize, operate different systems, recognize that the climate will be different on a day to day basis.”

The City of Toronto adopted its Climate Change Action Plan in 2007, which focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. In 2008, it also designed a climate change adaptation plan called “Ahead of the Storm: Preparing Toronto for Climate Change”, which outlined several actions to improve resilience to climate change and extreme weather events.

Dutfield says the city is continuing to further its efforts in creating a more resilient Toronto, by building upon these plans. “The city is doing a tremendous amount to get ahead of the curb … It had an adaptation plan a long, long time ago, and it has constantly tried to build and build and build upon that. We’re obviously not there yet; it’s a work in progress.”

According to meteorologist Mark Robinson, it’s hard to prepare for events of the scale of the two Toronto storms of 2013, because even if the city does prepare in advance, the actual events will probably exceed expectations and test the city’s system in ways that were "never thought possible."

Robinson added that the problem with the nature of extreme events is that they don’t happen all the time. "It’s hard to test these sorts of things when you’re talking about these sort of events … If you’re dealing with a flood of the scale that it had or the ice storm it had, those are events that you really scrambled to get things going, and to be honest, I actually think [the City of Toronto] did a good job of it, given the scale of these events.”

Dusha Sritharan, campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance, says that Torontonians have the opportunity to hold their policymakers accountable and push for the types of changes needed to improve resilience and mitigate climate change.

“We need to make sure that they’re invested so that we’re preparing ourselves for the impacts of climate change because it’s no longer an issue of the future. It’s something that’s happening now and it requires a response,” Sritharan said.

According to Glen Murray, Ontario minister of the environment and climate change, municipalities like Toronto must sort through and understand the impacts of extreme weather and climate change, often after they experience the impacts.

“Trying to anticipate by 2030 how the climate’s going to change … it’s very, very hard to, very hard to assess in advance and hard to manage because you don’t know what different set of different climate conditions [or] a shift of climate actually often means, until you do actually experience it,” Murray said.