By ERNIE NEUFELD
It came as something of a shock to me when I saw a section page of a daily newspaper devoted to the story of Hurricane Hazel and its 1954 assault on the Toronto area. It was fifty years ago, the headline kicker proclaimed. To me it seemed not like yesterday, but perhaps a dozen or 20 years ago, although I knew it really was longer.
It was a few years before television really had emerged as a bona fide news medium, bringing us graphically every night the day's horrors from around the globe. The "elite" who had acquired this luxury settled for wrestling, puppet shows, the "Honeymooners" and a newsman solemnly reading typed news reports while trying to look as though he personally had witnessed all he was relating.
A far cry from what we all saw this fall when four hurricanes struck Florida and various Caribbean islands in follow-the-leader sequence.
Back then newspapers and radio were our only real sources for news. And the news that day was really not good. But the danger was not clearly defined and didn't prepare us for the nature of the reality.
We had been warned that Hurricane Hazel had wrought havoc in Haiti and along the eastern U.S. seaboard. But what does that tell you when total exposure to this type of storm has largely been confined to movies?
Sure, we had seen still (or movie) shots of palm trees doubled almost over on themselves, and little tropical island huts made from sticks and twigs and mud being blown away by ruthless storms. But we had no palm trees (only a few optimistically planted saplings) and surely our two-year-old brick house would not be blown away.
Warnings were strong enough, however, to cause uneasiness, and the brutally unrelenting rain kindled fears of things sinister but undefined.
At the time I worked at the Toronto Star, and the quarter-mile walk to the waterfront parking lot left me drenched to the skin. Held up by flooded railway underpasses, it took me more than two hours to reach a point where a policeman helped me get my little English car onto the sidewalk and across to the other side of the underpass.
Until then it had been close to a horror story, but on the other side, the rain seemed to have abated and the streets looked isolated. I drove the rest of the way in spooky darkness, almost convinced the worst was over and worries had been for nought.
Next morning we discovered the expected high winds had not been the principal feature of the event in our part of the continent.
As the Toronto Star noted in its recent flashback, residents had assumed when the rain ended in the evening the worst that had happened was a few flooded basements, damaged roofs and knocked-out power lines.
Recalled the Star: "The storm had dumped 300 million metric tonnes of water on an area already sodden with heavy rain, which had fallen steadily the previous two weeks.
"With the earth too saturated to absorb more, the sudden glut of water began rolling downhill toward Lake Ontario, picking up momentum as it went, surging to eight metres high as it crushed over the banks of the Humber, Credit and Don Rivers and the intricate system of creeks that fed them."
By morning at least 81 people had been washed away to their deaths, several thousands were homeless and the storm left damage estimated at $180 million in today's currency.
Half of Toronto's dead were residents of a section of Raymore Drive, which, it later was charged, ought never to have been used for housing.
It is now claimed that some good came from the unexpected effects
of the storm: since that time many valleys and treed areas in
Toronto have been protected from subdividing to protect the environment
and prevent or mitigate similar disasters. Scant consolation for
families of the dead, but reassuring to succeeding generations.
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