Toronto's Sunnyside Beach has been declared unsafe to swim in after a powerful storm caused a storm sewer to overflow on Tuesday night.
City officials fenced off the Sunnyside area Wednesday morning as the sewer overflow flooded a children's park and part of the street. The flow also spilled into the beach water and a wading pool in the area was filled with muddy water.
Authorities also closed off Sunnyside Gus-Ryder Pool when water seeped into the electrical room.
"Stay away from Sunnyside area until further notice, until crews have done the necessary clean-up and we've done the appropriate testing to make sure there's no health concern," said Michael D'Andrea, the city's director of water infrastructure management.
D'Andrea said the system that overflowed was a combined storm sewer system holding both water and sewage. He said officials are still trying to determine how much of the overflow contained sewage waste.
He said the city tests all of Toronto's beaches for E.coli levels every day but that additional tests will be done all along the lakefront because of the storm.
The storm was so powerful, electricity was knocked out in hundreds of homes and the flood water was so intense, it was able to move a 28,000-pound concrete slab off of its foundation. Many residents in the area reported flooding in their basements.
D'Andrea said the city's outdated infrastructure is partly to blame.
"Our infrastructure is designed to deal with normal storm conditions," he told reporters outside Sunnyside Park on Wednesday morning. "The system wasn't designed for extreme conditions."
He said the city faces a big challenge in retrofitting and reconstructing the infrastructure so that it can better handle extreme weather.
For updated conditions on Sunnyside Beach and other Toronto beaches, click here.
