The Toronto mansion of rap superstar Drake has been seriously flooded following record-breaking storms in the city.
He shared footage on Instagram of ankle-deep muddy water rushing into an area of his home, with the caption “this better be espresso martini”.
Toronto experienced nearly 100mm (four inches) of rain on Tuesday, according to Environment Canada, surpassing a daily record that had stood since 1941. Some 167,000 customers were left without power according to the city’s electrical grid operator, Toronto Hydro.
Emergency services faced numerous callouts to people trapped in lifts thanks to the power cuts, while others had to be rescued from flooded motorways.
David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told broadcaster CBC there had been multiple storms “lined up like a parade, like jumbo jets on the airport tarmac … This is the new reality. It used to be river flooding, now it is urban flooding.”
Drake’s mansion, which covers 50,000 sq ft and is located in the high-end Bridle Path area of Toronto, was recently targeted in a series of incidents in the wake of the rapper’s high-profile beef with rival Kendrick Lamar.
A security guard was shot and seriously injured in early May. The following day a man was arrested for attempting to break into the mansion, and two other trespassing incidents were reported that week.
No motive has been ascribed for each of those incidents, but they occurred in the wake of Lamar using an aerial image of Drake’s mansion as the artwork for his diss track Not Like Us. It went on to reach No 1 in the US charts, making it the most successful in a series of tracks in which the two rappers levelled serious allegations at the other, regarding underage sex, adultery and more.
In a 2020 interview with Architectural Digest, Drake describes the mansion, known as The Embassy, as “overwhelming high luxury … Because I was building it in my hometown, I wanted the structure to stand firm for 100 years. I wanted it to have a monumental scale and feel. It will be one of the things I leave behind, so it had to be timeless and strong.”
