Kingston was among the cities hit hardest by Friday morning’s thunderstorm.

Heavy rain caused flooding throughout the city as storm sewers struggled to drain the deluge.

A system that came out of Michigan across Lake Huron overnight dumped heavy rain across much of Ontario’s cottage country.

“From Orillia to Peterborough people were getting huge amounts of rain,” said Environment Canada meteorologist David Phillips.

In all Kingston received 71 millimetres of rain in a four-hour period.

“Seventy-one millimetres in four hours is very intense,” said Peter Kimbell of Environment Canada’s Ottawa office.

Only Coldwater, north of Barrie, where 74 mm fell, received more rain than Kingston.

At 11 a.m., Kingston Fire and Rescue responded to a call at Extendicare, a long-term care home on Queen Mary Road.

“The actual problem is that the sewers are blocked up in the City of Kingston,” said administrator for the centre Tanya Pilgrim. “We had a chair floating down our parking lot.”

“We’re trying to keep up,” Pilgrim said. “(Water is) coming in from the floor where the water mains are.”

Several residents were moved to a different room inside the building because of the water.

“We moved them to the dining room for lunch service as usual,” she said.

Gordon Ball, assistant deputy chief for Kingston Fire and Rescue, said firefighters responded to several calls.

“We’ve been kind of non-stop going in the last hour,” Ball said at 12:30 p.m. “When you get major downpour, you get roofs leaking.”

Having water on any electrical systems can be dangerous and activates fire alarms, accounting for the number of calls, he said.

Perhaps, ironically, the city closed wading pools at McBurney and Victoria parks Friday, as well as the new outdoor aquatic centre at the Memorial Centre, though it was expected to reopen by the end of the day.

Businesses specializing in flood damage restoration were quickly booked solid. Local contractor Firstonsite Restoration had to transfer calls to an office in Belleville because of the number of requests which related to flood damage.

Eric Dinell, general manager for Environmentall Contracting Services, said Friday’s storm resulted in a busy day for many local businesses.

“It’s like being pulled in 10 different directions,” he said.

At one site on King Street a manhole lid was lifted off the ground due to an uncontrollable outpouring of water.

“It had nowhere to go,” Dinell said.

Crews were called to places like the Kingston Yacht Club and Wellington Street Theatre to pump out mounting basement water, sometimes a metre deep.

“It’s not until the rain stops that you can take control of it,” Dinell said.

Flooding was a common story Friday afternoon.

Tim Pater owns restaurants Le Chien Noir Bistro, Atomica Gourmet Pizza and Harper’s Burger Bar downtown. He said Harper’s had to be closed down for lunch due to flooding.

“We had flooding coming through the rear ceiling,” he said. “It was a pretty severe water accumulation.”

Staff at the restaurant used buckets and garbage pails to keep the water at bay.

“The staff was great, right on top of it with mops.”

Harper’s was able to reopen for dinner service last night.

President and CEO of Utilities Kingston Jim Keech said rainfall between noon and 1 p.m. yesterday was extreme.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before,” Keech said. “It’s an incredible amount of rain in a short period of time.”

Both the city’s sewer system and storm water system were overflowing.

“That much rain, they’re not designed to handle,” Keech said.

City infrastructure was damaged in the storm.

“We’ve had some of our electrical vaults flood downtown … so we shut the power out to the area,” Keech said. Power was restored by late afternoon.

Several roads were closed throughout the city. At one point mid-day Kingston police reported road closures at Ordnance and Wellington streets, Union and King streets, Bath Road at Queen Mary, Bath Road between Portsmouth Avenue and Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard, King and Centre streets, numerous stretches of Ontario Street and Gardiners Road just north of Bath Road, under the CN overpass.

The unprecedented rainfall encompassed most of the city, Keech said.

“Unfortunately there have been a number of heavy rain events over the last few years,” he said. “What we’ve seen to this point, this is probably the largest one-hour event.”

Keech said the city collects a database of information for calls relating to flooding, so residents should report damage to the city.

Marcel Philippe is a resident of one of several apartments at the corner of Bath Road and Portsmouth Avenue, an intersection completely inundated during Friday’s massive midday storm.

“My apartment faces (Bath Road),” Philippe said from the flooded parking lot of his building Friday afternoon, where he and his neighbours waded around to survey damage and watch the storm.

“Cars were trying to drive down the road, smaller cars, and their exhaust would get drowned out so they’d stall. Then (the drivers) would go to open their doors and water would pour into their cars.”

Philippe, 23, said the underground parking garage of the building where he lives had also flooded, with water up to his knees. The building’s outdoor swimming pool was just inches away from being filled by rising flood water as well.

“I’ve lived in the building just about a year,” he said, and had never experienced a flood like this before.

“The building is six years old and the building manager said it’s never happened this bad.”

At the adjacent building, which sits even lower, he said, water had nearly reached the patio doors of ground-level units.

Phil Deslauriers, 24, also lives at Bath and Portsmouth. He said he was surprised to see police directing traffic off Bath Road through his building’s parking lot, in an effort to divert them from the flood.

He pulled in a large, borrowed black truck, relieved, he said, that he’d taken his own car to the mechanic the day before for service — and removed it from the parking garage.

Other municipalities were also hit as Friday’s storm rolled through the central part of the province.

Collingwood received 55 mm, Barrie got 62 mm, Orillia saw 67 mm fall and Peterborough received 55 mm.

The storm was intense but not as bad as some systems that hit other parts of Ontario earlier this summer.

On Wednesday a storm dumped 83 mm on Harrow, near Windsor, in southwestern Ontario. In June about 90 mm fell on Ottawa.