Overnight storms downed trees and knocked out power to customers in Northeast Georgia on Monday.

Scott Cagle, Hall County Fire Marshal, said Hall County Fire Services received about 20 calls during the height of the storm, mostly of reported trees or powerlines down. He said no injuries were reported.

One residence off Waterwood Drive was severely damaged by a fallen tree, but Cagle said “the occupant was not injured and stayed with friends after firefighters secured the structure.”

Approximately 3,000 Georgia Power customers in the Gainesville area were without power during the height of the storm Monday, but fewer than 10 customers in Hall and Habersham were without power by noon Tuesday.
Bonnie Jones of Jackson EMC said that between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Monday the company had about 20 individual scattered outages that affected about 1,000 customers in Hall and Lumpkin counties.

Jones said the outages ranged from a circuit out in Murrayville that caused 273 customers to lose power for four minutes to individual outages impacting anywhere from one to 200 customers with outages from a few minutes to two and a half hours. She said most of the damage was from trees and limbs on lines.

The Clarkesville area saw the most damage from Monday’s storm as strong, straight-line winds blew through North Georgia.

Lynn Smith, director of Habersham County’s Emergency Management Agency, said damage in Clarkesville included “trees down, power lines down, power outages, trees on residences, gas leaks, open exposed water lines and signs down on Department of Transportation routes.”

No injuries were reported in Habersham during the storm.

Smith clarified the storm was “not a tornado; it was just a microburst. It’s just straight-line winds.”

The National Weather Service received reports of trees down in Cherokee, Dawson, Forsyth, Morgan and White counties.

In Athens, a line of storms and heavy winds left a collapsed roof on a downtown building, which had recently been a leasing office. The Athens Banner-Herald reported that the roof of a clothing store next door also sustained some damage, though less severe. No injuries were reported.