There ought to be another word than just "cold" or "freezing" for what's happening outside Wednesday. Neither seems quite right to describe the bone chilling temperatures that moved into the GTA with a sudden swiftness just before the sun came up.
At 4am it was 7C at Pearson International Airport. An hour later, the reading was just 2C. By 8am, it had dropped to -6C. And it just kept falling. But the temperatures weren't the biggest problem. The cold front that blew Tuesday's near record warmth out of here brought with it a wind warning that created havoc all over the city and points beyond.
Bitter breezes gusting as high as 80 or 90 kilometres per hour created wind chill values in the -20 to -25 range. The highest in the city: 93 km/h clocked at Pearson just before 6am. Tree limbs fell all over the city and there were sporadic power outages as hydro lines came down in some spots.
And evidence of Old Man Winter's return was everywhere. A stretch of
Yonge and Eglinton was shut down for several hours, after a window in the Canadian Tire office tower shattered in the wind, leaving shards of glass all over the street. Cops were able to reopen it just before 11am.
Pedestrians were being kept away from
Carlton St. east of Yonge, as a crane being used on an almost finished building wobbled and blew crazily in the stiff gusts. Debris from the construction project also hit the street below. The street was declared safe by 8am.
The driver of a TTC service truck had his own close call, after a fallen tree branch came through his windshield at
Dovercourt Rd. near Dundas West. "I was heading northbound on Dovercourt and the tree came down and caught on the windshield of the truck," Jason Hackett relates, handling a piece of the branch. "Smashed through it and brought down some wires."
A homeowner named Elaine lives on
Old English Lane in the Bayview and Steeles area. She watched helplessly as a tree came crashing down in her backyard, flattening her wooden fence, creating a terrible sense of winter déjà vu. "When I looked out the window I was like shocked because this is not the first time," she complains. "This is the second time that's happened when these huge beautiful Austrian pines just come tumbling over because they're very shallow-rooted, and one year we had about $40,000 of damage when this happened."
And on it went. A piece of metal dangling precariously from a building three storeys up caused concern at
Bloor and Jane.
Crews managed to secure it before it came off. Some boards threatened to fall off a roof at
Queen and John, as the breeze moved it slowly towards the edge.
If it was tough for those in cars, it was even harder for people out of them. Pedestrians walking in the traditional 'wind tunnel-like' areas of the city were frozen in seconds, while also having to dodge debris like garbage and blue boxes that turned their routes into moving obstacle courses.
It was so breezy on the Burlington Skyway in the late morning, the winds actually succeeded in
toppling an empty tractor trailer as it tried to make its way over the exposed area.
The conditions have prompted the city to call an extreme cold weather alert, called whenever the temperature reaches -15C without the wind chill. It allows extra shelter beds to be opened and increased patrols to help the homeless. If you see anyone in distress on the streets, call
1-866-392-3777. It's free from any pay phone.
Things weren't much better out of town, with some 30,000 people up north without electricity or heat in the bitter cold, and wind chills touching -30.
The good news is this won't last. The front causing all this should be gone by Thursday, replaced by a still cold day but one filled with calmer conditions and some sunshine. But don't let it fool you. We're not done with the bad weather yet.
A new disturbance is expected to hit us head-on Friday, bringing between 5 to 15 centimetres of snow to the city depending on how it tracks. It should get here just in time for the afternoon rush home, complicating an already difficult last day of the work week.
How they measure wind chill
Western Canada shivers with wind chills near -50
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Weather forecast
Michael Kuss's weather blog