A powerful storm also swept through Toronto Sunday afternoon, causing flooded roads and downed trees and leaving 10,000 people across the city without power.

Lee Walsh was unloading groceries during the storm at his home on the corner Lumsden and Cedarvale Aves. in East York when he heard “a crack, then a crash.”

The sound was a large tree in his yard falling onto and smashing a nearby bus shelter, mangling street signs and power lines on its way down.

Walsh and his wife scrambled into their car to take refuge but the house remained unscathed.

“It was like a tornado here. . . it was raining so hard you couldn’t even see,” he said.

Sunday’s storm started around 2:40 p.m. and produced gusts of wind up to 100 km/h. It drenched some parts of the city with more than 40 millimetres of rain in only 10 minutes. Some roads remained closed Sunday evening as many old trees had fallen and taken power lines with them.

On Sunday night, 6,000 Toronto Hydro customers affected by storm-related outages were still without electricity, said spokesperson Jennifer Link. Crews were set to work through the night to restore their power.

Walsh’s house was spared any damage, but not everyone shared his luck. Kathy Cowan, who lives on Oakdene Cres. just north of Danforth Ave., was waiting out the storm in a nearby grocery store before hailing a taxi home.

She arrived to find her Mazda station wagon crushed under the weight of her neighbour’s 100-year old maple tree, the remains of which were strewn across five lawns on both sides of the road and tangled with downed power lines.

The rotting tree’s stump bore an orange dot, signaling the city had planned to take it down soon.

Cowan wasn’t upset about the fate of her two-year-old car.

“At the end of the day, you put it in perspective—it’s just metal.”

Agostino Speciale, who lives across the street, saw the tree fall.

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“It was like a bomb, an explosion.” he said. “I’ve lived here 50 years … sooner or later, one of those old trees was going to come down.”

--With files from Amanda Kwan and Aleysha Haniff