Pedestrians at the Terrasse Dufferin during a snowstorm in Quebec City, Canada, yesterday.
Toronto: Extraordinary winter weather was causing chaos in the run-up to Christmas, bringing deadly ice storms, flooding and tornadoes to the mid-United States and south-east Canada. Almost a million were without power and 15 people were killed.
Almost two inches of ice coated Toronto and plunged hundreds of thousands into darkness and cold at the weekend after a fierce ice storm hit the city and brought trees down onto power lines.
A bitterly cold air system from the west smashed into an unseasonably warm bubble of air moving up the Atlantic coast, creating a swath of dangerous storms from north Texas, across the prairie, up through the Great Lakes and across eastern Canada as far as Nova Scotia. While residents of New York City and Washington DC experienced unseasonably mild weather, with temperatures hitting record lows in those cities on Sunday, Detroit and Toronto were hit by freezing rain that turned into an ice blanket.
A woman was killed when a rare winter tornado zipped through Arkansas with 130mph winds. Five were killed in flooding in Kentucky, with three killed in traffic accidents in Oklahoma and six perishing on icy roads as the ice storm hit Ontario.
Hospitals in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, are currently operating on emergency power generation. Energy companies are struggling to bring power back to the hospitals first and hope to have ordinary households restored with heat and light in time for Christmas.
The Guardian
