South Bayview’s neighborhoods are hard hit by the ice storm power outages. Leaside east of Bayview and large parts of Bennington Heights and Moore Park are in the dark. To the north, outages are patchy but Lawrence Park and Sherwood Park have been badly hit. Traffic signals are dangerously without power. Those who know the area will note the absence of lights at Mt. Pleasant and Moore Ave. and at Bayview and Millwood Rd. The lights at Mt Pleasant and Merton Street are flashng a four way red, which is much safer. South Bayview is dark on both sides as is Mt Pleasant. The normally busy Esso gas bar on Mt Pleasant is closed.  

Fallen trees and branches litter the streets of mid-town Toronto this Sunday (December 22, 2013) as more than a quarter of a million people in Canada’s largest municipality are without power. Toronto Hydro has estimated 250,000 in the dark but later in the day raised that number to 300,000. Across the Greater Toronto Area, it appears as many as half a million may be without power. Because of the still uncounted number of lines down in Toronto it is likely that many will face Christmas Eve, or maybe even Christmas morning, without lights and power..Hydro emergency sources were telling residents to expect service for snapped wires laying across vehicles to be looked after “in two or three days.” It is, as Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong put it, the worst storm the city has see in recent times. Hydro CEO Anthony Haines called the ice storm “catastrophic.” Mayor Ford held a news conference in the early afternoon in which he said that two hospitals, Sunnybrook and East General, are without power. This disconcerting news was clarified by Premier Wynne in her news conference in which she noted that the two hospitals are operating on back up generated power. She thanked those who still had electricity in their homes for welcoming neighbors who were caught in the blackout into their homes. The outages have occurred in patches of sometimes curious pattern through the mid-town corridor of the city. One aspect of this is the number of mature trees in that part of the city. Sometimes an outage involved only one home. Elsewhere, as in large parts of South Bayview, the outage is quite general.  Toronto Hydro said it may be up to 72 hours before power is fully restored. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Harper said his thoughts are with with those who are without power. Photo via Twitter of Toronto after a long dark night of falling trees. 

Apologies to Robert Frost who wrote that Good fences make good neighbors. These crazy-quilt city-built tree protection fences take things up a notch as our municipal passion for protecting trees appears to have run amok. It’s a source of on-going public curiosity and amusement at 126 Manor Road where Redpath Ave. joins. The fences are installed around the oddest collection of growth we have seen behind such fences. In fairness, there is one big old tree in the backyard which no doubt deserves to live. This is the contentious site of a proposal which nearly went to the OMB for settlement. It is said the owner  Zoran Sretenovic, wanted something like a three-storey row house here. But with the help of Josh Matlow (Ward 22) and staff, agreement was reached by all parties for a semi-detached home. It was nip and tuck because even though there was an agreement brewing between the parties, the Committee of Adjustment denied a deferral and the application was refused. The applicant, Mr. Sretenovic, filed an appeal with the OMB.  But with Mr. Matlow’s interest the matter was re-opened and there was an agreement reached without reference to the provincial body. The semi should fit nicely on this fairly large corner lot.  Strange, strange fences though.  

Toronto Star reporter Amy Dempsey does a kind of stately dance here on how Billy Bishop Airport could become, step by artful step, a great big roaring airport with planes from all over North America landing there.  Amy Dempsey