A rain storm for the ages

Anyone following the news reports from the Greater Toronto Area knows about the torrential rain and flooding that happened all across southern Ontario, as slow-moving thunderstorm fronts emptied more rain in two hours on the Toronto area than normally falls in a month. However, just as nearly everyone else was getting rained on in biblical quantity, our neighbourhood seemed to be in a dry bubble.

We were outside trying to get the grass cut and some yard work done, and I remarked to Bob on how I might have to water the plants because they were so dry. He was cutting the grass at the time, and got nearly the whole job done at precisely the time the rest of the GTA was getting rained on. He was using an electric lawn mower, so we don’t cut the grass when it is even damp, and that grass was dry.

And then the lights went out

As the temperature began to drop, and the wind picked up, we quickly left the lawn-mowing and my planting, got everything put away and came inside. However, outside of some light rain, that did not last too long, nothing else happened for some time. Just about 6:00 p.m., the lights went out (as they did over much of the Greater Toronto Area), and they stayed out until 10:57 p.m.

Bob lit half a dozen candles, we found the wind-up radio downstairs, and went to our secure stash of flashlights, all with freshly-charged batteries. Bob has a wireless internet hub, which allowed us access to whatever web sites still had power, or had not crashed due to the heavy traffic. Along with some of the lawn moon rays that Bob brought in from outside, our downstairs was rather romantically-lit for the evening. We kept the fridge doors closed for the evening, just in case this outage had lasted longer than it did.

Bob got some updates from our electricity supplier, Enersource, and was able to use the wireless hub to post them for his constituents on Facebook and Twitter. Being based in the USA, and built for high capacity, the extra Ontario traffic did not mean much to these sites, but was a valuable link in keeping Ontarians informed.

We briefly thought of perhaps going out to dinner, but after listening to the radio, we came to the two obvious conclusions: where would we go, as the power outage was very widespread; and every authority on the radio said that if you’d managed to navigate the often-flooded traffic and get home, you ought to stay there. Besides, we have electric garage doors openers, and they would have to be yanked up manually. At least we now know that when the power fails, you absolutely cannot open our garage doors from the outside.

All in all, other than a five-hour power outage, we were largely spared the problems of the great July inundation of rain at our home.