A severe storm tore through Toronto on September 3, 2026, dumping as much as 110 millimetres of rain in some areas within a matter of hours, an amount the city’s own manager described as consistent with a 100-year storm event, according to Canada’s National Observer. The storm knocked out power to tens of thousands of customers, flooded the Don Valley Parkway, suspended subway service during rush hour, and left thousands of calls flooding into the city’s fire department, second only to the 2013 ice storm in call volume.
For residents in South Riverdale and Leslieville, the September storm was not a novelty. Sonya Vahidy, who lives in one of the flood-prone pockets of the neighbourhood, told CityNews that her basement has now flooded twice in two years, once in 2024 and again this month, despite years of public talk about flood mitigation spending. She said she and her neighbours want to know why money that has already gone out the door has not translated into dry basements.
Billions spent, same neighbourhoods flooded
The city has pointed to two large capital programs as evidence of progress. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Port Lands Flood Protection Project carries a price tag exceeding $1.2 billion and was built to stop the Don River from overtopping its banks during heavy rain. A TRCA spokesperson told CityNews the project performed exactly as designed during the September storm, because the flooding residents experienced was a separate category of failure, so-called urban flooding caused by storm sewers and catch basins that could not keep pace with the volume of rain.
Toronto Water’s general manager, Lou Di Gironimo, told CityNews the city has spent $1.3 billion so far on its basement flooding protection program, replacing old sewers with larger ones and building underground storage tanks in some neighbourhoods. He pointed to Willowdale, where a comparable storm in 2005 flooded thousands of homes and where far fewer homes flooded this time, as evidence the approach works when it is finished. He also acknowledged the city has a long way to go before South Riverdale and other unprotected neighbourhoods see the same benefit, and said an additional $2.3 million is planned over the next decade, though he did not give residents a timeline for when their streets would see new infrastructure.
That combination of acknowledged progress in some areas and open-ended timelines in others is at the centre of the frustration voiced by residents like Vahidy, who says she has already spent her own money on sump pumps and is now adding backup power, without confidence it will be enough during the next major storm.
What the coverage leaves out
Neither CTV News Toronto’s initial storm coverage nor the wider follow-up reporting presses city hall on why capital repair schedules have consistently lagged behind the pace at which these storms are recurring. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow told a news conference the city’s emergency response was co-ordinated and that the storm had passed, according to the National Observer’s report, a framing focused on emergency response rather than on the underlying capital planning question residents in South Riverdale are actually asking. Di Gironimo’s own comment to CityNews, that homeowners want the city to go faster but there is only so much work that can be done with available dollars, is one of the only public admissions from an official that the pace of infrastructure renewal, not just the severity of the storms, is part of the problem.
How the outlets framed it
CTV News Toronto’s on-the-ground coverage from September 3 treated the storm largely as a weather and property-damage story, running footage of broken trees and flooded streets alongside brief interviews, without probing why the same infrastructure failures had occurred before. The National Observer’s coverage widened the lens to municipal emergency response, quoting Mayor Chow’s assurance that the city was prepared and co-ordinated, a framing that centres official reassurance rather than accountability. CityNews, by contrast, gave the most space to residents directly questioning where the flood mitigation money went and whether the TRCA’s completed projects and Toronto Water’s ongoing program actually address the type of flooding hitting their homes. The difference reveals that outlets closer to the affected neighbourhoods surfaced harder questions about spending outcomes than the outlets covering the storm as a single weather event.
Taken together, the record shows a city that has spent more than $2.5 billion combined on two separate flood infrastructure programs over roughly two decades, while residents in some of the very neighbourhoods those programs were meant to protect experienced their second severe flood in two years. Officials maintain the money has produced measurable results in places like Willowdale. Residents in South Riverdale are still waiting to see whether that record will extend to their own streets before the next storm arrives.
