A PERFECT STORM
How a rapidly growing Toronto was caught unprepared for Hurricane Hazel’s devastation.
Five Etobicoke firefighters, answering a call to rescue people stranded in acar by the Humber River, are tossed into the roiling waters and drown when their fire truck overturns.
Thirty-five people on Raymore Dr. in Weston die when floodwaters carrying the remnants of a bridge knock out the foundations of their homes, sweeping them away.
Amother stands on the porch of her flood-threatened home and hands her 4-month-old daughter to a firefighter who takes her to safety, returning within moments for the rest of the family only to find the Etobicoke house has been swept into Lake Ontario. The baby — Nancy Thorpe — would become known as the “Storm Orphan.”
These are just some of the heartbreaking stories of Hurricane Hazel, which struck the Toronto area on Oct. 15-16, 1954, with winds that reached 124 kilometres an hour and more than 200 millimetres of rain falling in 48 hours. It remains one of Canada’s worst hurricanes and one of the GTA’s worst natural disasters, resulting in 81 deaths, leaving some 1,900 homeless and racking up more than $1 billion in damages in today’s dollars. Toronto was not prepared. A number of factors had conspired to make the city ripe for the “perfect storm.”
Two years before Hazel struck, the city of Toronto had declined a costly proposal to build a number of dams on the Humber River. It didn’t help that postwar development had occurred on flood plains throughout the city and its suburban communities, such as the south end of Etobicoke Creek, along the Don Valley and in Weston, next to the Humber River.
An above-average rainfall in September1954 meant the water table in the Toronto area was already high, unable to absorb the rain dropped by the storm. According to Environment Canada, the rain from the storm ran off into the rivers and creeks, “raising water levels by six to eight metres. Water coursed through creeks where they had never existed, derailed trains and washed out roads.” In Woodbridge, the Humber swelled to107 metres at its narrowest point. Hwy. 400 was washed out in a number of places. Etobicoke Creek overflowed its banks, flooding three streets completely. Houses were washed into Lake Ontario.
Also contributing to the city’s state of unreadiness was the fact that some meteorologists had predicted that Hazel, which had already devastated Haiti and the Carolina coast, would “abate over the Alleghenies (in the U.S.).”
Around 7 p.m. on Oct. 15, when there came a lull in the rainy weather, Canada’s chief meteorologist, Fred Turnbull, warned “the worst is yet to come. This is the pause that always comes during a hurricane,” according to the book Hurricane Hazel by Betty Kennedy.
At 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 15 came the final, official forecast from the national Dominion Weather Office: “The intensity of this storm has decreased to the point where it should no longer be classified as a hurricane. The weakening storm will continue northward, passing east of Toronto before midnight.”
That didn’t happen. The eye of the hurricane passed over Toronto at about midnight Oct. 15.
The first death was reported just before that, at 11 p.m. in Woodbridge, the first community on the Humber to flood, when a car was swept into the river. In Weston, the flood crest that hit Raymore Dr. came about 1 a.m., when many residents were in bed.
“When the flood broke, rescuers waded neck deep to rescue those they could reach. At the same time they could hear the shrieks of terror of those who were unable to escape. They went to watery graves in the storm,” read a story in the Oct. 18 edition of the Toronto Star alongside photos of dazed survivors of Raymore Dr.
There were also stories of heroes and survival against all odds.
The Star’s front page on Oct. 16 noted how lucky telephone lineman Gerald Elliott was after he had clung for four hours to a willow tree in the Humber River before being rescued. An earlier attempt by firefighters to save him failed when the fire hose thrown to him broke and he was carried farther down the river, barely managing to grab a tree branch. A man named Max Hurley used a rowboat to save him.
“I don’t see how I could have held on much longer. I thought I would drown for sure,” he told the Star.
Off-duty police Const. Jim Crawford and Herb Jones, a contractor, made 20 trips into the Humber in Jones’s 25-horsepower motorboat, in water high as telephone wires, saving 50 people. The Etobicoke Historical Society recognized their efforts with a plaque in 2004.
Thirteen children, their parents and the family cat spent the night on the second floor of their house as it floated and spun like a top in the flooded Holland Marsh, according to a personal account by survivor Henry De Peuter. The De Peuter family survived and the house finally rested, four kilometres from its original site.
The havoc wreaked by Hazel led to many changes in urban planning and the creation of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which established a flood control plan that combined land expropriation and dam and water reservoir construction. Many of the former residential areas in Toronto that were affected by Hazel have been turned into parkland.
Because of the overall death toll — which reached 400 in Haiti and 95 in the U.S., in addition to Canada’s 81 — and the magnitude of destruction, the name Hazel was retired from further use by the World Meteorological Organization.