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...