A moment of clarity in a broken, flooded city

If you were lucky, Tuesday — the day Toronto broke — was a good day to go nowhere, do nothing and barely communicate with the outside world.

- EDWARD KEENAN

A car sits stranded between Lake Shore Boulevard West and The Queensway Tuesday after the rain had passed.

By afternoon, when the sun started shining, I guess it was a good day to walk around, maybe visit a park. It sure wasn’t much of a day for getting stuff done.

For many others, the day was, no doubt, a disaster. Chunks of the Gardiner Expressway, Don Valley Parkway and the 401 shut down. Downtown road underpasses flooded out. Huge swaths of subway Lines 1 and 2 inoperable; Union Station partly underwater. GO trains and Via Rail, too. On the radio, fire and police authorities said emergency calls were triple the normal volume and 911 lines were overloaded. And then, of course, for more than 127,000 Torontonians the lights went out and, at least in my part of town, took the internet with them.

It turns out getting two months’ worth of rainfall in the course of a few hours will do that to a city. Or to this city, anyway. Not quite shut it down entirely, but slooooooooooooooow it to a craaaaaaaaawl.

But if you were lucky and had nothing pressing to do, the storm brought a kind of liberating feeling of realizing nothing much is getting done and there’s nothing much you can do about it. You adjust your expectations, and a kind of giddiness can take over. You’re off the hook from your normal frustrated hopes of productivity.