More snow, and then sun, on the way in Toronto as massive storm delivers white-knuckle Christmas

There’s sunshine and a white Christmas on tap for Sunday, but the monumental winter storm that swept through the GTA will stretch into the weekend, continuing to snarl plans for holiday travel.

A nasty combination of snowfall and powerful winds knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes across Ontario and Quebec on Friday and prompted the cancellation of hundreds of flights out of Pearson and Billy Bishop airports.

And in a stunning scene near London, Ont., more than 100 cars were caught up in collisions on a busy stretch of the 401.

The storm also battered the U.S., where the National Weather Service called it a “once-in-a-generation type event.” There were power outages across 25 states, at least 7,000 cancelled flights over two days, and more than 200 million Americans were under some sort of weather watch or advisory on Friday.

A winter storm warning continued into Saturday for the city of Toronto, with Environment Canada calling for snow to keep falling and wind gusts of up to 90 kilometres per hour to reduce visibility to close to zero at times.

The weather agency said the snow should taper to flurries by mid-morning Saturday but bitterly cold wind-chill values would persist into the weekend and blowing snow would continue to make driving dangerous. Still the day is looking much better for Toronto air passengers.

By Christmas day, Environment Canada is calling for the sun to peek through, along with a mix of clouds and a 60-per-cent chance of flurries.

Friday started out rainy and cold in Toronto — the rain had prevented the city from salting the streets overnight — but the precipitation soon turned to driving snow and temperatures dropped even further amid fierce winds.

Toronto issued an extreme cold weather alert Friday morning, after Environment Canada predicted a temperature of -15 C or colder, or a wind chill of -20 or colder.

Later in the day, the city said it was freeing up more space at Metro Hall, one of three warming centres that offer people experiencing homelessness a place to warm up, have a snack, rest and use the washroom.

On the roads, authorities issued repeated pleas for drivers to stay home, but by early afternoon, the Ontario Provincial Police West Region reported that more than 100 vehicles were involved in numerous collisions on a busy stretch of the 401 in the southwestern part of the province.

Middlesex OPP media officer Const. Jeff Hare called the pileups, along with an additional 50 collisions on Highway 402, “one of the worst traffic scenes” he’d ever witnessed.

The OPP said just two people were taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

But some vehicles were badly damaged, the police force said, and at least one was crushed beyond recognition according to a photo the OPP West Region shared on Twitter.

“You don’t want to be caught in this,” the OPP tweeted.

At the border, Niagara bridges were closed to U.S.-bound traffic.

In Toronto, schools were closed and traffic was lighter than usual, but driving conditions were still treacherous.

TTC buses drove past 41 stops without stopping after the transit authority took them out of service temporarily — the stops were in locations known to be tricky for buses to navigate, such as steep hills.

Downtown, police said weather forced the closure of roads in the area of University Avenue and Dundas Avenue West in the late afternoon.

For those travelling by air — or attempting to — the cancellations began Thursday night, when WestJet said it was proactively cancelling all flights out of Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec.

On Friday, Air Canada said it was cancelling “a number of flights” in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, including all flights out of Toronto’s downtown island airport. By late afternoon, Billy Bishop said all remaining Porter flights out of the airport were also cancelled for the day.

By mid-afternoon, about one-third of flights into or out of Pearson were cancelled, but Saturday could see an improvement.

The Greater Toronto Airports Authority, which operates Pearson, said the airport is actually in pretty good shape, with snow removal and de-icing measures running smoothly.

“We think we’re going to have a fairly normal operation tomorrow aside from the airlines having to still kind of recover from any of the cancellations that they saw,” said GTAA spokesperson Tori Gass.

WestJet also said Friday evening that it would resume operations at Pearson at 7 a.m. Saturday.

As the storm swept across Ontario and Quebec, many homes in rural areas saw power knocked out.

Quebec was hit particularly hard, with more than 241,000 customers without power as of noon, according to Hydro-Québec. The largest outages affected the Quebec City area, Outaouais, Estrie, Laurentides and Montérégie regions.

By early afternoon in Ontario, Hydro One said more than 50,000 customers were without power across most of southern Ontario, while Hydro Ottawa said outages were affecting 11,500 customers.

About 30,000 customers were also without power in central Ontario, with outages stretching from north of Peterborough to south of Algonquin Provincial Park.

Finally, some good news for anyone wondering what’s in store for Santa Claus on Saturday evening.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which lets people follow St. Nick’s Christmas Eve journey through the skies on noradsanta.org, said it doesn’t expect the storm will affect Santa’s travels.

With files from Star staff and Star wire services

SHARE: