Stormy weekend leaves Windsor with flooding, backlog of service calls

Stormy weekend leaves Windsor with flooding, backlog of service calls

Weekend of wild weather included multiple downpours

A weekend of wild weather across the Windsor area has left the southwestern Ontario border city still climbing out of the mess it left.

It started with downed trees and heavy rains during a Friday night storm — one that shut down a festival in neighbouring Essex County and injured four people there.

Then came Sunday’s heavy rainfall across multiple parts of the day.

Some parts of Windsor logged roughly 100 millimetres of rainfall, according to the Essex Region Conservation Authority (ERCA).

“These summer storms pop up quite quickly and can be quite localized,” said Tian Martin, ERCA’s water resources engineer. “Which is why there wasn't a significant amount of lead time because they do appear quite suddenly.”

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Some of the areas hardest hit were east and south Windsor.

Windsor’s head city engineer said Sunday’s rainfall ended up being much heavier than what was originally expected.

“We’ve had a high volume of 311 calls coming in predominantly today,” David Simpson told CBC News Monday.

“We’re definitely in the order of ... hundreds of ... calls. I do know we had a number of reported flooding areas in south Windsor, the Remington [Park] area, Devonshire Heights, Fontainebleau areas and so on.”

Simpson said those areas are seeing a lot of ponding and standing water, and their pumping system was basically at full capacity as of noon Monday. He said that has to do with the elevation of those low-lying areas, as well as, in some cases, the age of the infrastructure.

“Historically, the Riverside area is certainly quite challenged during heavy wet weather events too," he said.

"I do know there are very high flows in that area right now; our system seems to be able to keep up with that right now.”

According to Simpson, a number of calls were also placed following trees downed in Friday night’s storm.

John Robinson said he knew there was an issue when he was out in front of the Windsor Canadian Aviation Museum Sunday, and there was a lot of water in the parking lot.

“I looked out towards the taxiway and the ramp, and there was a large lake of water there,” the museum’s president told CBC News.

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“As I opened the door, I immediately turned the lights on and ... there was at least two inches of water across the entire … hangar floor — and it also had moved into our east side offices.”

While the planes in the museum weren’t damaged, he said, the amount of rain that made its way into the 1939-built hangar will require a lot of clean-up.

“This is water that actually accumulated on the properties around the museum and made their way into the hangar ... through the drains and through the doors, the main hangar door and a couple of our loading doors on the north side of the building,” he said.

Robinson said the flooding will cause the museum to reopen Wednesday of this week and not Tuesday.

“I've never seen it this bad," he said.

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"This system that came through basically hung right over the airport. It might have been other places in the city, but it seemed like [it] just hung around here. It was just constant, just constant rain.”

The weekend storms also had thousands of Windsorites without power amidst the hot temperatures.

At its peak after Friday’s storm, roughly 11,000 of Enwin Utilities’ 92,000 customers didn’t have electricity around 6:30 p.m.

President Jim Brown says crews were able to quickly knock that number down to around 3,000, however, Sunday’s storms hampered their weekend restoration efforts.

“Some customers were out for that entire duration,” he said.

“We do appreciate their patience and with the the outages and the length of time it took … electricity is really important to people, affects our lives.”

Brown says the initial Friday storm hit the city pretty broadly.

“Basically the older areas of the city where the hardest hit. Those areas were originally built and developed with rear yard servicing on alleys. Anything underground really wasn't … too badly affected. But those, those rear yards with all the trees, mature trees were the hardest hit areas.”

And, he says, those areas are difficult for crews to tackle because it’s hard to get access.

“Before you can do anything with the electrical infrastructure, you have to get the trees off the lines and, and a clear path that puts the infrastructure back up.”

The Town of Tecumseh said in a media release that 74 millimetres of rain fell over a two-hour period on Sunday, and some parts of town saw up to 105 millimetres of rain.

Ponds formed over roadways, private properties and low-lying areas, the town said. Public works staff are still cleaning up and removing debris from roads.

It's asking people with flooded basements to fill out a survey.

The town says debris will be picked up as part of regular garbage collection. The town will accept bags of waste on Thursday, not just garbage in hard-sided containers.