Hurricane Hazel was the deadliest and costliest hurricane of the 1954 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm killed at least 400 people in Haiti before striking the United States near the border between North and South Carolina, as a Category 4 hurricane. After causing 95 fatalities in the US, Hazel struck Canada as an extratropical storm, raising the death toll by 81 people, mostly in Toronto. As a result of the high death toll and the damage caused by Hazel, its name was retired from use for North Atlantic hurricanes.

There had been significant rainfall in the Toronto area in the two weeks prior to Hazel, so the ground was already saturated. Few people in Canada had any experience with hurricanes, since it was unheard of for them to travel as far north and inland as Toronto. Kennedy also notes that if "Toronto had been about to face a blizzard, or was threatened by a 14-inch [36-cm] snowfall, that [sic] would have been something understandable. This was different. This was the unknown, the unfamiliar, the totally unexpected crisis. Hurricanes belonged in the tropics."

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• Effect in .CA

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