The City of Toronto says the worst is over, at least for now, ending an extreme heat alert that was posted ahead of last week's heat wave.
Dr. David McKeown, Toronto's medical officer of health, cancelled the five-day-old alert Monday morning amid sporadic bursts of thunderstorms and temperatures that dipped below 20 degrees Celsius.
Monday's high was predicted to be 28 C – a far cry from the record-setting 38 C the city peaked at on Thursday.
An extreme heat alert is declared when the risk of suffering a heat-related death in the city is 50 per cent higher than what it would be on a day without a heat alert, according to Toronto Public Health.
Thunderstorm causes spot blackouts
Isolated thunderstorms across southern Ontario Monday morning had caused spot blackouts across the Toronto area.
A power outage in Mimico left some 3,500 customers in the dark on Monday, while nearly 1,500 residences in Port Union, south of Rouge Park, also lost power during the morning.
Toronto Hydro said a tree that had fallen on a hydro wire was responsible for the Mimico outage.
Toronto Hydro was also reporting less serious outages in areas around Scarborough, East York, North York and the Humber Valley, although in most cases fewer than 50 homes had been affected.
Isolated non-severe thunderstorms were expected to occur over eastern Ontario Monday evening and into Tuesday and could including damaging winds and torrential downpours
