In her book Hurricane Hazel, Canadian journalist Betty Kennedy argued that in Canada, the impressions that Hazel was "the best-kept secret in town" and that it was a "fully documented meteorological event that should have taken nobody by surprise" both "paradoxically [..] contain a great deal of truth" [REF].
There had been significant rainfall in the Toronto area in the two weeks prior to Hazel, so the ground was already saturated.