When the rain takes over

For some of us living in a big city when there is a major rain fall, things can be greatly impacted. For us here in Toronto there is a river that runs right beside a highway and when the river overflows the highway gets flooded.  This has happened quite a few times over the years and there doesn’t seem to be a solution on how to manage this situation.

·         When we get lots of rain the river is one of the main places that the rainwater is sent so that means that when there is lots of rain, around 2–3 inches there is going to be an issue.

·         This river is right beside one of the highways (Don Valley Parkway) and the river shores are a little higher than the highway, so you can guess what happens.

So, the results that happen is that the Don River decided to overflow its banks and where does the water go except onto the two roadways that are right beside this river and that means that both of these roads/highways are flooded so that means that there is a major issue.

It got higher after this

On July 16^th, 2024, there was an issue where we saw a lot of rain and as you can probably guess the Don Valley Parkway overflowed and both directions of the highway were closed and there were vehicles stuck because they were caught in all the water. This issue also affected the road on the other side of the river which is Bayview Avenue and that was also closed because of flooding so yes lots of issues that needed to be handled.

This storm that I am talking about impacted a lot of things and with all the rain we got there were also a lot of power outages within Toronto and Toronto Fire had received more than 75% more calls than normal through the day today so that was also something that had to be dealt with. Toronto Fire and Hydro requested that if it wasn’t an emergency to place stop trying to report everything and leave the lines available for emergency issues.

Our transit system (TTC) as also impacted given all the rain and power outages. Some of the vehicles were being diverted and other parts of the transit system just needed to be changed. For our subway system we cannot divert trains, but they can change the starting and stopping of the routes and that is what they did. The system tried their back to maintain service the best that they could and given the amount of rain that we got I am happy with how things were managed.

The flooding of the Don River was only one of the issues that the city had to deal with because there were a lot of other roads that were flooded, which meant people being stranded in their vehicles or the transit system having to divert around the issues. It was a day that a lot of people probably would have wished that they stayed at home today instead of going out and trying to get into the office.

For us, we normally work at home which is good, especially when it rains like it did today. However, when a client has an issue, and you are the closest one to one of their offices, you have to start figuring out how you are going to get to that location. Given all the power outages and flooding it the area of the client site it would have meant a bit of a walk, but thankfully things were resolved remotely, and it meant no trip was required.

So, the water decided to take over the city on the 16^th of July, and it did impact a lot of people, but the water is slowly starting to subside and drain and that means that things should get back to normal before too long or at least we hope that it does. It is now late on the 16^th, and I am checking what has been happening, and I think a lot of the city is getting back to normal and hopefully tomorrow morning everything will be working just fine.