Toronto littered with fallen trees, debris following wind storm
Toronto Hydro received reports of 170 wires down following the intense five minute wind storm of Sunday afternoon.

TheStar.com
Oct. 16, 2017
Alexandra Jones

It only took five to 20 minutes to lay out trees and wrench down wires all across the city, but the cleanup effort required in the aftermath did not have the luxury of being so brief.

Trees bent double in the wind and rain lashed gray and heavy against windows as winds of up to 90 km/h battered the city for a few tense minutes Sunday afternoon. Environment Canada issued a “wind warning” for Toronto until the gusts dropped down to 20 km/h overnight. Power was knocked out for roughly 25,000 customers, Toronto Hydro said.

“We had roughly 170 wires-down calls, which is an extraordinary amount” said Brian Buchan, Toronto Hydro communications director.

He said in his experience, it was the most wires down he’d seen since the ice storm of 2013, which knocked out power for almost 300,000 people in Toronto. Buchan said there could be even more trees felled than the number of wires down would suggest, as some trees may have fallen in backyards and missed the power lines.

In the aftermath of Sunday’s storm, Twitter lit up with photos and testimonies of the damage caused by the winds, with trees brought down across wires and streets, and even onto cars and houses.

“We’ve seen people’s cars crushed by trees and I know one story of someone who was talking about how they were in the car only 20 minutes earlier,” Buchan said. “Fortunately we haven’t heard of any major injuries.”

Repair crews with Toronto Hydro worked through the night to try and get power back on, and continued through Monday, when over 40 crews were mobilized.

“Right now it’s a lot of ‘all hands on deck,’ everybody’s running around,” Buchan said. “We ended up getting over 300 incidents logged that (all occurred) within five minutes.”

They were still investigating around 200 incidents early Monday afternoon.

What made this storm unusual, Buchan said, was the speed with which it wrecked its havoc.

“It basically rolled through (in five minutes), and caused a lot of destruction, so I think in that respect it was unique. We’ve seen numerous storms and wind storms in the past. With this one it was really remarkable because of the intensity and duration of it.”

Toronto Hydro intended to restore power to everyone by the end of Monday.

“This is a lot of hand-to-hand, combat-type restoration,” Buchan said. “Where you’re going in, there’s one wire down, a tree’s knocked it down, you’ve got to re-string the wires and get people back on. We’re dealing with a high number of them but they’re all very small, individual customers or streets.”