Peterborough, Simcoe in state of emergency as workers continue to clear debris, restore power
This article was written by Ben Cohen and was published in the Toronto Star on April 4, 2025.
Nearly 170,000 central and northern Ontario residents were still without power Thursday after about one million people were cut off by the past weekend’s ice storms, described as the worst in the province in nearly 30 years.
Five days later, states of emergency remain active in the hardest hit regions in Peterborough and Simcoe counties, where officials have urged people to stay inside while emergency crews tear down debris and work to restore hydro.
Experts say these storms will become more frequent as the climate changes. Some say expensive work should be undertaken to harden infrastructure against them by burying power lines. Options to keep trees standing are more limited.
Peterborough Mayor Jeff Leal sensed danger approaching Saturday as the rain was picking up.
“My wife and I could hear tree branches cracking and falling,” he told the Star on Thursday. “It’s quite an eerie sensation when it’s going on all around you.”
Come morning the floor of the forest near his home was covered in ice and splintered trees. He assembled a war room in the east end of the city, staffed with the heads of the local fire, police and social services, as well as provincial emergency management personnel.
Together they surveyed the damage. Rain torrents had been freezing on contact, each rivulet adding weight until the trees could bear it no more and collapsed into the streets. On Monday afternoon, Leal officially declared an emergency.
By Thursday afternoon, close to 30,000 Peterborough homes were still without power, down from more than 93,000 in the wake of the storm. Leal said it will take weeks to clear all the damage wrought. The state of emergency will remain at least until electricity is restored, which should be by the weekend, according to Hydro One.
Hydro One has 3,800 people on the ground working to reconnect more than 170,000 Ontarians in what has been described as the worst storm since 1998 when up to 100 millimetres of freezing rain and ice pellets hit eastern Ontario and Quebec for five days, killing an estimated 35 people.
On Thursday, Niagara hydro workers deployed to Peterborough. Premier Doug Ford said he planned to visit some of the affected areas on Friday, including the storm command centre in Orillia.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Ford told reporters at Queen’s Park on Thursday morning. “We’re working full out again, we have the teams out there from emergency management, the Ontario Corps, warming centres, foods brought in.”
Humanitarian organizations are also in Peterborough, working to free people trapped in their homes by downed trees and feed the hungry. Peterborough also converted its public transit buses into mobile warming centres. “The people have been through a lot,” said Leal. “Particularly the more vulnerable seniors, who because of the power outages have become trapped in their apartments. But everybody is pitching in our time of need.”
It’s been a “long year” for the people of Orillia, another of the cities most devastated by the ice storm, resident Amber McGarvey told Simcoe.com Wednesday.
“From the devastating fire downtown that destroyed so much, to the recordsetting snow levels that caused additional damage, and now this storm, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed at times,” she said.
McGarvey described to Simcoe.com reporter Ian Adams the “tense, anxious night” she spent praying a tree wouldn’t crash through her ceiling on the night of the storm. It “felt like it could go on forever,” she said.
Scientists say it won’t be long before she experiences another.
“Unfortunately it’s one result of global warming in an intensifying hydrological cycle,” said Kent Moore, professor of theoretical geophysics of climate change at the University of Toronto Mississauga, in an email to the Star.
The rain cycle — evaporation, condensation, precipitation — is speeding up because a hotter atmosphere sucks up more water vapour. This ends up triggering both more droughts and more deluges.
“Warm air can hold more water vapour and water vapour is a source of energy for the weather systems.”
He said this explains the backtoback historic rainfalls Toronto saw over the summer, as well. How does a warming climate make freezing rain more frequent? By making snow less frequent.
“If it had been a bit colder, we would have had a snow event,” said Moore. “Bad but nothing like the damage to infrastructure we experienced (from the freezing rain).”
As these storms proliferate, it will typically be more rural areas — with more trees to topple — that suffer most, said Joseph Desloges, professor of geography and earth sciences at U of T, in an email to the Star.
“Areas away from the shorelines of the great lakes are generally cooler so rain can be more prone to freezing the further north and east you go from the GTA,” he added.
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