High winds take toll on Greater Toronto Area

Strong winds causeddangerous conditionsin Toronto on Sunday, including fallen trees, downed wiresand flying objects, Toronto police warned.

A special weather statementis also in effect for the City of Toronto, advising of flurries and possibly icy roads.

The Government of Canada website says temperatures are set to fall below freezing early this evening, and there is potential for roads to be icy through Monday morning.

Tree uprooted, transit lights down

Highwinds uprooted a large tree in front of a Toronto elementary school onSunday.

Toronto police saidthe tree at Huron Street and Lowther Avenuebrought down some wires. The area, in front of Huron Street Junior Public School, wastaped off and officersclosed one lane on Huron Street.

High winds also brought down a set of transit signalsatSpadinaAvenue and NassauStreet on Sunday.

The pole was leaning into live streetcar wires and the 510 Spadina streetcar was temporarily diverted, as crews came in to fix the pole.

Tree down in Markham

The weather also brought down a large tree branch in Markham, Ont.,north of Toronto, which knocked out power tothousands of peoplefor a few hours on Sunday morning.

John Olthuis, manager of customer communications at PowerStream Inc., said about 12,000 customers in Markham lost power starting at 9:20 a.m.

By noon, power had been restored to almost all customers in Markham.

Olthuis said crews restoredpower to customers in stages.

"We had a limb come down over a line that was a main feeder," he said.

Olthuis said the utility addedcrews to get the power restored sooner than expected.

Thousands of customers without power

Meanwhile across southern and central Ontario, thousands ofHydro One customers were also without power due to high winds, downed trees and power lines.

Dana Gardner, spokesperson for Hydro One, said the utility is working as quickly and safely as possible to restore power, but restoration times dependon the local area.

The outages are concentrated in southern and central Ontario, she said.

She said Hydro One's storm outage maps on its website are updated every 15 minutes.