Saturday's all-day regular rain turned into all-night freezing rain and by Sunday morning Toronto was coated in an inch of solid ice. Streets had turned into skating rinks and streecars into big red roadblocks. The storm also essentially cancelled an important last-minute Christmas shopping day; frenzied giftbuyers now have one less day to scour the stores (suggestions: ice scrapers, crampons).
Toronto's tree canopy is one of its biggest assets, but it also puts the city at a big disadvantage during storms like this. The huge old trees on many of the downtown core streets are already vulnerable to breakage, and the added weight of all that ice was just too much for a lot of them. This morning a lot of streets were still barricaded with huge limbs that had plummeted to the pavement, sometimes dragging down live power and communication lines with them or crushing perfectly innocent parked cars. Toronto Hydro is warning the power might be out all week.
· Some Great Ice Storm Photos [Toronto Star]
· More Ice Storm Shots [Torontoist]
· Toronto Hydro Predicts a Dark Christmas [blogTO]
· Travel and Service Updates [CBC]