Canadian rapper Drake shared a video of him wading through what appears to be his waterlogged Toronto flooded mansion Tuesday after the city was hit by a torrential rainstorm that caused widespread flooding and power outages.
“This better be Espresso Martini,” Drake joked on Instagram alongside a video of murky brown water surging into a room. Drake’s home, known as “the Embassy,” is in Toronto’s luxury Bridle Path neighbourhood.
More rain fell in four hours Tuesday in Canada’s largest city than Toronto’s average rainfall for July, submerging city streets, shuttering highways and subway stations, and leaving tens of thousands of people without power.
More than 97 millimetres (about 3.82 inches) of rain were recorded at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, the airport wrote on X Tuesday afternoon, making it the fifth wettest day ever recorded. Tuesday also shattered the previous rainfall record for July 16, set in 1941 when 25.9 millimetres (1 inch) fell at the, the post said.
Record-setting storms have wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and North America this summer. Hurricane Beryl – the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic – caused widespread damage in Grenada and Jamaica this month, killing at least nine people, before unleashing flooding, rains and winds in Texas.
Beryl knocked out power to more than 2.5 million homes and left at least eight people dead in Texas and Louisiana.
Scientists have long warned that extreme weather events, affecting countries across the world, are becoming increasingly common as the climate crisis accelerates.
“We really, seriously, have to deal with climate change, because these kinds of days are going to be a lot more frequent,” Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said in a news conference.
Toronto’s ageing infrastructure makes it more vulnerable to flooding, Chow added.
Toronto Fire Services said it processed nearly 1,700 calls for service and dispatched to almost 500 incidents between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to a statement posted to X, including more than 50 elevator rescues and more than 20 people who needed to be rescued from cars and buildings as a result significant rain.
According to an update from the city, the storm left 167,000 Toronto Hydro customers without power.
Photos showed cars floating on a highway east of the city. And rain leaked through the ceiling at City Hall, the Toronto Star reported. Meanwhile, a pedestrian tunnel connecting air travellers to the city’s Billy Bishop airport, which is located on an island, flooded, the airport said on X.