It wasn’t a typhoon. It was just a regular old thunderstorm.

But when it barrelled through Montreal on Sunday after days of a heat wave, a record amount of rainfall poured from the skies, flooding basements and inundating underpasses.

Homeowners from Ahuntsic-Cartierville to St-Léonard found their belongings floating. An octogenarian had to be rescued from his nearly submerged vehicle by Montreal police.

And it could happen all over again on Thursday, weather forecasters have warned.

We’ve now reached the point where climate change has made what was once extraordinary ordinary. Severe weather isn’t a once-a-decade or even once-a-year occurrence anymore. During our hot, humid summers, it has practically become a weekly phenomenon.

Last August, hurricane Debby, which had been downgraded to a post-tropical storm by the time it arrived, doused Montreal with up to 150 millimetres of rain in some parts of the region — a wet month’s worth in a single day. It caused

© Montreal Gazette