The boy who was born to skate,
Pearson Mbonda was surrounded by ice at birth.
“And now I’m a great skater,” chimes the Pickering boy, who came into the world by flashlight four years ago during the Christmastime ice storm of 2013.
The storm, which hit Greater Toronto on Dec. 21and 22 of that year, dropped 20 to 30 millimetres of freezing rain and cut power to hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses and public buildings across the region.
One of those was the Ajax-Pickering Hospital, where Paula and Al Mbonda arrived at 4 a.m. on Dec. 22 after a harrowing, half-hour drive.
“We made the really scary drive . . . and on the ride to the hospital my water broke,” Paula Mbonda recalls. “So this baby was coming really fast.” At the hospital, ambulances blocked the entrance and officials were turning patients away.
With Mbonda’s natal state being exigent, staff made an exception and wheeled her through dark corridors to a birthing room, where a midwife would deliver Pearson soon after in a batterypowered flashlight beam.
Mbonda still doesn’t know why the hospital didn’t have backup generator power that night. (The hospital had a working backup generator to supply power to critical equipment that night, but not lighting for the delivery room.) “I think that we had to look at it that we had a very happy baby boy and a fine experience overall,” she says.
That experience made the youngest of Mbonda’s three, hockey-mad sons a minor celebrity, with his birth being shared across social media. Online references focused not only on the flashlight delivery, but on his unusual namesake.
“We spent the time (driving to the hospital) selecting different possible names . . . related to the situation,” Paula Mbonda says.
“Storm was one of them. But on the radio they kept talking about the delays at Pearson airport and different things happening there so we sort of went with that.”
The storm played havoc with holiday plans: 416,000 Toronto Hydro customers — 57 per cent of the total base — lost power during the two-day storm, and some would remain without electricity for as many as 11 days.
In the aftermath, the company struck a panel to review its response to the outage.