Georgia Power crews work to restore service to customers Monday night.ATLANTA (CBS ATLANTA) -
Powerful storms that swept through metro Atlanta Monday night sparked damaging lightning strikes and left thousands of Georgia residents in the dark.
In Atlanta, strong winds toppled trees in several neighborhoods, damaging cars and homes.
"That was a fast moving storm," said Willie Thompson. "I heard a big ball of wind. Whoof! It knocked my lights out." He came outside and saw that a fallen tree had sliced off the corner of his neighbor's house on Allegheny Street in southwest Atlanta.
"I'm just glad she didn't get hurt," he said.
Heavy rains caused flooding on Interstate 85 southbound near the Georgia 400 merge. Crews spent the early morning hours Tuesday successfully unclogging a storm drain.
A Georgia Power representative said that as of 9 a.m. Tuesday, fewer than 1,000 customers were without power Tuesday morning after heavy rain and lightning moved through the state. Most of the outages were in East Atlanta.
At the height of the outage, 13,000 Georgia Power customers were without power, the company representative said.
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