Woman Narrowly Misses Disaster As Winds Bring Down Tree Limb On Car
Posted May 14, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A wild weather day in the GTA has left crews scrambling to repair Mother Nature’s handiwork and at least one woman grateful she wasn’t a few feet closer to her neighbour’s car.
Sustained winds reached 65 kilometres an hour at Pearson International Airport Thursday, with gusts up to 82. It was the same in the city, and the evidence was quickly felt all over town.
But few felt it more than Debbie Wolfson. She was standing near her home around Parkside and the Lakeshore, not far from High Park, when she heard a noise and went over to investigate. She found a giant tree limb had crushed the car next door (top left.)
“I heard the crash,” she recalls. “The wind was really blowing a lot and the tree came down and the electrical wires sparked and I didn’t realize it had fallen on the car.”
It’s a busy area in the afternoon, with kids coming home from school and people out walking their dogs. Luckily, it missed them all. “It’s scary,” Wolfson adds. “My kids ride their little bikes up and down.”
The tree had stood for 70 years but the gusts finally took it down.
The car’s owner wasn’t home at the time, but her mother admits she’s going to be in for a big surprise. “At a quick glance, the entire back window is smashed out and the roof is damaged,” assesses Irene, the woman’s mother.
Not far away, crews were dealing with a different problem – trees blowing into hydro wires, causing them to arc. Police were forced to close down the sidewalk while experts tried to fix the danger. If the winds knock over hydro lines in your area, don’t go near them. Call (416) 542-8000 and let the experts fix the problem for you.
Meanwhile, at Crawford and Barton in the Ossington and Bloor area, another tree came down with a crash. ” It was sort of waving in the wind,” one witness recalls. “It was there and then I looked back and it was gone.”
And it wasn’t just trees. The breezes were strong enough to blow two bus shelters over in North York. One went down at Rajah and Hotspur in the Wilson and 401 area. Another came crashing to the ground at Wilson and Avenue Rd. A mother and a child were nearby at the time, but fortunately weren’t inside when the structure collapsed.
Authorities were forced to bring in a crane to lift it back up.
“I just seen the shelter laying on the road, the wind blew it over,” relates City of Toronto worker Troy Cook, sent to help clean up the mess. His people have been busy. “These guys did like three or four today they say. The wind’s just unbelievable today, just blowing shelters over left, right and centre.”
Bad as it was, it could have been worse. The winds were part of a system that slammed into four U.S. states. Areas of Indiana , Oklahoma and Illinois were all hit by major destructive winds, while a tornado flattened a small town in Missouri . Three people died and hundreds of homes were destroyed across a wide area. Thousands more remain without power.
The good news is that those winds will die down completely in the GTA by nightfall, leading to a much calmer evening.
But after a pleasant Friday, we’re in for a disappointing Victoria Day weekend. Rain is expected for the morning, before it clears out on Saturday afternoon. Highs should touch 20C. And while the other two days will be sunny, both will also be much cooler.
Temperatures on Sunday may only hit 12C and will recover to just 17C on Monday. That means the long holiday won’t feel much like the first unofficial weekend of summer.
And in the tradition of nothing ever quite working out right, by the time you go back to work, it will be pretty near perfect, with highs at 20C by Tuesday and nearing 25C by mid-week.
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