Where did you go, Toronto!
Toronto’s mayor was ruthlessly roasted online Monday after she confused meters with centimeters — making it sound like the city was wiped off the map — when discussing the historic snowstorm that battered it.
Olivia Chow, the 68-year-old mayor, flubbed at on-air press briefing while trying to explain the record-breaking amount of snow dumped on her Canadian city over the weekend.
“Some areas received up to 56 meters of snow, and this is a record-breaking storm,” she announced.
The mistake made it sound like Toronto was buried alive — 56 meters equates to 2,204 inches of snow!
Toronto was actually hit with 22 inches, or 56 centimeters, of snow.
Her captive audience, largely made up of her snowed-in constituents, didn’t miss her gross miscalculation.
“It was worse than that during the last ice age apparently,” one person posted to X.
“Feel so lucky still alive, not buried by the 56m snow,” another teased.
“Hey, Toronto, are you okay?” one Instagram user joked.
Others pinned her gaffe on Canada’s delayed conversion to the metric system — half a century ago.
At the same presser, Chow said that 600 plows were deployed across the city on top of the 1,300 workers who were “actively and relentlessly plowing,” CP24 reported.
“The roads now, you can get from one place to another place, and so the city is not paralyzed like perhaps was 21 years ago or something like that where the mayor at the time called in the army,” Chow assured.
“So, I don’t think we need to bring in the army.”
On Tuesday, the mayor said that crews were focusing on removing snow that piled up near hospitals and trucking it to storage facilities around the city, as reported by the Toronto Star.
Once the hospitals and other central hubs are cleared, Chow said crews will pivot to remove snow along residential streets.
CP24 Meteorologist Bill Coulter said Toronto received “the brunt” of Winter Storm Fern, which ravaged the East Coast in the US before leaping across the northern border.
“The ingredients were there. The cold arctic air sliding down from the arctic and interacting with very warm moist air over the tropics and that spun up a monster of a system, impacting millions of people stateside,” Coulter explained.
“We got the northern fringes [of the storm] so not only did we get system snow but we got a cold easterly wind which drew moisture off the lake and caused lake enhancement and snow squalls that sat right over Toronto.
“What a winter wallop for Toronto,” he added.
Across the Big Apple, the boroughs saw anywhere from 11 to 14 inches of snow Sunday, with more expected as a Nor’easter barrels toward the East Coast.
At least 28 people in the US died during Winter Storm Fern, including 10 in New York City, though their causes of death are all still under investigation.
