It came on fast. One minute it was a normal Wednesday afternoon, the next the sky over downtown Toronto had gone almost black, hail was pounding rooftops north of the city, and water was pooling in the streets faster than anyone could get out of its way.Thursday morning, the cleanup was still just getting started.
Toronto Hydro had roughly 8,300 customers without power. Hydro One — the utility that covers most of the rest of the province — was still showing more than 58,000 customers offline. Crews were out overnight, but between the downed trees and the snapped lines, some neighbourhoods are probably going to be waiting a while longer.
Rush Hour Never Had a Chance
Anyone trying to get home Wednesday afternoon already knows how bad it got. Yonge Street flooded. So did stretches of the Don Valley Parkway, badly enough that drivers got stuck watching the water climb around their cars. The subway shut down too — right at the worst possible moment — and thousands of commuters were left figuring out plan B in the middle of a downpour.
Hail, High Winds, and a Close Call With a Tornado
This wasn’t a garden-variety thunderstorm. Environment Canada had flagged the risk hours ahead of time: damaging winds, large hail, and a real chance a tornado could touch down somewhere along the storm’s track. North of the city, hail came down big enough to dent cars — the kind of stuff that ended up all over social media within minutes, along with clips of floodwater swallowing bus stations and people sprinting for cover.
This Keeps Happening
Toronto’s no stranger to this kind of storm anymore. Knock out power to tens of thousands of people, turn a few major roads into rivers, repeat — it’s starting to feel less like a fluke and more like a pattern. For now, the usual advice still applies: keep clear of any downed lines, don’t assume someone else already reported the outage on your block, and just don’t drive through a flooded road, no matter how shallow it looks.
Numbers are still moving — check with Toronto Hydro or Hydro One directly for the latest where you are.