Storm Causes Havoc for Many Forsyth Residents

Late Wednesday afternoon a storm blew through the area leaving behind downed trees, power outages and igniting several fires.

The National Weather Forecast in Peachtree City issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Forsyth County at about 4:25 p.m. Not long after the alert was released the skies opened up and heavy rain began to pour down coupled with lightning and gusty winds.

While the thunderstorm didn't last long, it did cause widespread havoc.

"We had four reported structure fires all during the height of the storm that rolled into Forsyth County just before 5 p.m.," said Division Chief Jason Shivers of the .

Two of the homes were minor, due to lightning strikes near the property, and two sustained significant damage. The fire burned the upper stories of those homes displacing the families. But Shivers said no one was injured. Though two firefighters suffered minor injuries, but both are doing "fine" and were expected to return to work Thursday.

Shivers also said the storm caused significant damage to four mobile homes due to downed trees. Again no injuries, but several families are currently without a place to live, but the Red Cross has been notified to aid assistance.

Due to the various emergencies that were going on, Shivers added, "On three different occasions the Forsyth County Fire Department was depleted down to all of our units."

The storm also zapped electricity to many homes and businesses keeping the power companies busy as well.

 reported nearly 3,000 customers were without power.

"Obviously we had some fast moving and pretty powerful storms that had a tremendous amount of lightning associated with them," said Blake House, company spokesperson. But he added, "They weren't out long which is good."

Georgia Power reports that about 2,000 of its customers were affected in some way by the storm.

"But the vast majority of those it looked like it would have been just a blink and then back on," said company spokesperson Carol Boatwright. "We had about 1,300 that had a little bit more of an outage than that."

Boatwright said half of those customers were without power for about 20 minutes and the rest had their power restored in about 45 minutes.

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