Residents and City of Toronto staff worked to refill sandbags and pump out water from Toronto Islands, a day after a storm pushed rising lakewater over temporary barriers causing significant flooding to area homes.

“People were panicking last night,” Tony Farebrother, co-chair of the Toronto Island Community Association, said Friday morning at a news conference on Ward’s Island.

Farebrother said Island residents, many of whom are elderly, have been worried that the Island could see a repeat of 2017, when water levels reached record highs and Island parks were closed for months.

On Thursday night, sloshing water in the harbour knocked a hole in the sandbag wall on the north shore of Ward’s Island, letting the lake pour in and leaving some homes surrounded by water, city spokesperson Brad Ross said.

No lives were in danger and there was no need to evacuate, Ross said Thursday, adding the pumping effort will take 48 to 72 hours.

“We used to have flooding every 25 years now it’s happening every two years,” said longtime resident Peter Chisholm, who said the water rose up to his front deck about three feet off the ground.

“It’s scary, to be honest. Look how vulnerable we are with all this water just in front of us,” he said.

While touring the island for about an hour Friday afternoon, Mayor John Tory noted that some of the impact was “very much related to climate-change,” a worldwide problem that Toronto can’t solve by itself.

By Friday morning, most of the streets on Ward’s Island were still flooded, and city vehicles could be seen crossing ponds of water.

Tory said it was a good thing that a number of houses were not affected, but pointed to the risk of more rain in the forecast.

“The weather that’s anticipated over the weekend is a concern,” but the city anticipates the Islands will remain safe, he said.

Looking ahead, city staff will need to sit down with residents and businesses and discuss making the Islands as flood-proof as possible, he said.

The city has deployed 24 industrial pumps to suck water out of the mainland, while city staff continue to use large sandbags to prevent flooding from accessing the Islands’ residential areas.

City staff are working 14- to 16-hour shifts to repair the sandbag walls and berms, Councillor Joe Cressy said Friday.

The floods are a sign the Islands needs permanent flood protection to protect against more frequent flooding caused by “accelerated climate change,” he said, noting that lake levels are nearing what the city saw in 2017.

“An annual sandbagging effort cannot be the solution,” he said.

“We will not allow, long term, the Islands to be simply consumed by water, nor will we accept the annual practice of mitigation and sandbagging,” Cressy added.

Meanwhile, the city says it expects that flood-protection measures put in place following the 2017 flood can deal with the water, even as Lake Ontario is projected to continue to rise over the next two weeks, said James Dann, waterfront district manager with City of Toronto Parks.

Since 2017, the city has implemented a number of measures to mitigate flood damage on the island, including new drainage systems and about 20 industrial water pumps.

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Despite the risk that storms may continue to breach the barriers, those measures are doing their job, he said.

“We are confident we can keep the Islands open the entire summer,” he said.

Nevertheless, the city is looking for cost-effective and permanent solutions to the flood risk, he said, noting the Islands are one of the few places in the city where Torontonians live in a floodplain.

A report due in June will speak to long-term mitigation measures, he said.

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