Temperatures Rising

It was dry in Fredericksburg, Virginia, seventy years ago this fall. So dry, in fact, that the city council authorized the employment of a “commercial rainmaker” in October 1954 — lest the nearby Rappahannock River, the community’s primary source of drinking water, drain completely. But that rainmaker’s contract proved superfluous, because Hurricane Hazel was on its way, unloading on the eastern seaboard as it moved to wreak destruction on southern Ontario.

The wind was blowing at 124 kilometres per hour when Toronto’s worst natural disaster arrived around midnight on October 15. Twenty-four hours later, some 200 millimetres had fallen on the region. Local waterways swelled, especially the Humber River in the city’s west end. Eighty-one people died, and damages would ultimately total the modern-day equivalent of $1 billion. (The cyclone wasn’t entirely bad news, at least for sports enthusiasts. Horse racing had somehow continued that day at both Long Branch and Belmont Park, where a two-year-old filly named Vestment set a world record for six furlongs, thanks to a tailwind assist.)

Hazel would not be the last $1‑billion deluge to hit Canada’s biggest city. On July 8, 2013, two consecutive thunderstorms dumped 126 millimetres of rain at Pearson International in just ninety minutes. Tens of thousands of rush-hour commuters were left stranded on highways, subways, and regional trains (and at least one magazine editor out for a run found himself stuck on the Lower Don Trail). In an incident that quickly entered Toronto lore, a Bay Street lawyer abandoned his $200,000 Ferrari in a submerged underpass near the Rogers Centre. But thankfully nobody died.

The 2013 flood was soon a benchmark for many Torontonians, one that came up several times as we were finalizing this issue of the magazine. On July 16, nearly 100 millimetres fell on the city in a matter of hours, forcing the closure of arterial roads and highways, inundating the country’s busiest transit hub, knocking out power for countless many, disrupting subway service, and snarling traffic on streets major and minor throughout the downtown core. As I write, basements are still swamped in some parts of town and the rivers are still swollen, but the insurance costs are already pegged at more than $1 billion.

These two flash floods should put paid to the expression “hundred-year storm,” which entered our vocabulary around the time of Hazel and has grown steadily in usage as we have inadequately grappled with the realities of climate change. It’s too soon to blame the latest calamity on anything specific, many will caution, which is not unlike saying a mass shooting is the wrong time to discuss gun violence in America. Regardless of the ultimate cause, the cloudburst underscores how ill prepared we are for what we know in our bones is coming.

The tempests have been many in recent days, whether we’re talking rain in Toronto or fires outside Labrador City, unrest on university campuses or unease in the literary community, failing infrastructure in Calgary or flailing peace talks in the Middle East, party intrigue in Ottawa or political violence in Butler. We’re all in this teapot together, but we’ve never seemed farther apart on finding the solutions to our divisive problems.

Seventy years have passed, and Hazel’s surging waters have long since receded. Yet the Globe and Mail seemed to be talking to us today when it memorialized the devastation then. “Such events test the fortitude of a people as few things in life can do,” the editorial board wrote. “Let us all meet the occasion with courage, and go forward perhaps more prudent in the light of experience, and wiser than before.”

Prudence seems terribly passé in an era of aggrieved bombast and political hyperbole, when topics as disparate as grocery shopping, freelance writing, book publishing, liquor sales, professional golf, artificial intelligence, and electioneering are cast in equally existential terms. Like the car enthusiast who sees dry pavement in a sodden tunnel, we are navigating the world with a skewed perspective. We need that sober counsel from 1954 to guide us as we brace for the turbulent weather, both real and metaphoric, that’s surely ahead — not the simplistic slogans or cable news talking points, not the rhetorical finger pointing or self-assured righteousness that has become de rigueur.

Beyond a Trump-Harris matchup south of the border, I cannot know what will dominate the headlines between the time this page goes to print and the time you read it. Given all that 2024 has already thrown our way, few would be surprised if the Liberals had a new leader or if the chattering classes had a new scandal. Nevertheless, as one tumult overshadows another, I hope we can comport ourselves with greater dignity while not forgetting the actual existential threat — a potentially uninhabitable planet — that ought to bring us together.