Items related to Extreme Canadian Weather: Freakish Storms and Unexpected...
Weather is the quintessential Canadian story. Despite it's characterization in the rest of the world as a land of bush and blizzards, Canada is a country of geographical and climatic variations. It experiences just about every type of extreme weather possible - tornadoes, droughts, dust storms, ice storms, hail storms, hurricanes, floods - in addition to lots of snowstorms. The weather is rarely boring and there are times when it has been so extreme, it has surprised everyone.
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About the Author:
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Joan Dixon writes from the foothills of the Rockies, where she also hikes, skis, and plays all kinds of sports with her family and friends. Her master's degree in Canadian Studies (with a specialization in sport history) and her time at the National Sport and Recreation Centre in Ottawa have helped shape her understanding of sport in Canadian life, while stories of Canada and amazing Canadians have always inspired her research and writing projects. Her most recent book is Made for Canada: the story of Avro's Arrow.
Looking down onto her flooded street that night, 16-year-old Sylvia Jones wished it was all just a terrible nightmare. Clambering up behind her onto the roof of her house were her father and several neighbours. Shivering and soaked to the core from rain that had not stopped all week, they huddled together, frightened and dazed in their bizarre circumstances. Only a little earlier that evening, Sylvia and her father had had to leave their stalled car in the middle of their street and wade to the safety of their porch. Soon, not even the porch was safe. The swollen Humber River had submerged it and the ground floor so quickly, the roof became the only hope. If Sylvia's father hadn't left a ladder up to it, they might already have drowned, trapped inside their house. When her parents built their new house on the flood plain, they had anticipated a little flooding, but nothing like this, and not in October. What they didn't know was that this was no ordinary rainstorm. As the refugees on the roof struggled to hang on in the vicious winds, the force of the river ripped the house off its foundations. Like an ark without a rudder, the house toppled into the raging river. Sylvia shrieked. Through her flashlight's beam, she saw a neighbour's house bobbing precariously in the current. Through the wind, she heard screams more desperate than her own. As Sylvia watched and prayed, a volunteer firefighter in a small boat fought whitecaps to reach the neighbour's tipping house. Hands passed him a baby through the window. He made it as far as Sylvia's rooftop to hand her off before braving the treacherous waters to try to rescue the rest of the family. Holding on to the baby as tightly as hope, Sylvia rocked her throughout that terrible night. The firefighter never returned. But at dawn's first light, other rescuers arrived. Gratefully, the exhausted teenager handed her young charge over, unaware that the baby was already an orphan. Her parents and brother had not survived the night - victims of Canada's 1954 hurricane, Hazel.
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- PublisherAmazing Stories
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 155277418X
- ISBN 13 9781552774182
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number2
- Number of pages144
- Rating
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