Fire, fire, toil and fire.

So, Wednesday 20th February. A cold day, -10 or so most of the day. I started the day waiting for the streetcar in a massive cloud of smoke. The entire downtown area was covered in a thick black smoke from a fire along my route to work.

On Queen Street between Bathurst and Portland a fire broke out in the small hours of the morning in a shop unit. By the time most people were leaving for work the fire had spread to fourteen separate buildings and had turned into what they call a six alarm fire. Fires over here are rated on a scale which determines what units are deployed to deal with it. It starts at one and only goes to seven. According to reports at its height it involved 30 firetrucks, fire helicopters, dozens of police cars and over 150 members of the fire department. By the end of the day most of the city block had been affected by the fire, some buildings had just collapsed and several others are likely to have to be demolished.

Due to the cold the firefighters visors were freezing up with the spray, icicles were hanging from the hoses, the area around had turned into a skating rink and rescue ladders were frozen solid to the walls. The city had closed off the area for three blocks around. Streetcars were being diverted down any other road that could take them which resulted in my route to work, along King Street, becoming rather congested especially since Queen Street is the major east-west artery in the centre of the city.

The affected buildings were mainly three and four storey structures which included both businesses and apartments in an area just designated of great historical value. The oldest building destroyed was 150 years old, which in North America is very old. Many of the businesses were family businesses one of which had been operating in the same location for 90 years and been owned and staffed by four generations of the same family who also lived above the shop. Theirs was the building that completely collapsed despite the fact the fire started four doors down.

It's a bit brisk out.

So, on the last post I mentioned that it was the night before a major storm was supposed to arrive. Well yes it did. And then another. And then a cold spell. And then another. All in all over the last three weeks we've had about two foot of snow and some really cold temperatures. Last Monday was a mild -18 degrees with a wind chill of -32. There were snow drifts in places of around four to six feet. Roads turn to ice rinks, cars turn to mobile snow transportation devices as people happily drive around with a foot and a half of ice encrusted compacted snow on their roofs.

The city council gets criticised for now ploughing enough, for ploughing too much, for creating barriers around the sidewalks with ploughed snow, for poorly ploughing the sidewalks, for bothering to plough the sidewalks, for burying people's cars in ploughed snow on smaller streets, for not ploughing side streets due to cars being parked there. The list goes on and the city cannot win.

Since the snow has, by and large, stayed around the city has launched an operation to remove the snow instead of letting it thaw off. This mainly consists of getting diggers out to lift the accumulated banks of snow into trucks so they can dispose of it somewhere else. When they clear the mounds of snow they find all sorts of things. People's cars that they haven't seen in weeks, bicycles, benches. In one case up in North York they found a body. A woman had been missing for a week and was found inside a snow bank at the end of a parking lot. No one is sure what happened as yet.

Even the lake has been freezing over. For several days it was more or less solid ice the entire way across the harbour to the islands. Walking down for a look some of it was strong enough to walk on, but some definitely not. That has mostly cleared now after the rain and milder weather at the weekend but it's still only -11 this morning. Mind you yesterday the cold weather made for interesting times for an incident in the city, but I'll talk about that in a separate post.

Top of the world ma!!! Top of the world.

So on Friday of this week (the 1st Feb) we had a major dumping of snow. My work office closed down early so people could get home. Schools had snow days and a reasonable amount of snow fell and it is still falling lightly. However the night immediately before that (31st January) was an incredibly clear night. A good job really as we had the best view on the continent.

On the Thursday night we decided to go out to celebrate my getting a job, getting my first paycheck, and a generally feel good night out. So we went to 360, the revolving restaurant at the top of the CN Tower. Can't beat the view. I challenge any restaurant anywhere else on the continent to produce a better view while you're sat at the dinner table.


They didn't hurry us and we were there nearly three hours, and sat through two full revolutions getting to see all the city and over the lake. It is truly beautiful at night and gives you a good impression for how large Toronto actually is.


Eating in a revolving restaurant does have its own peculiar problems though. The main one is if you get up to go to the washroom, when you return your table isn't where you left it. Also figuring out where the exit is afterwards takes a bit of a wander as things obviously move. Only the main dining area revolves, the kitchens and main amenities are in the centre and that bit stays still.