JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A band of storms that blew through Northeast Florida on Friday morning packed a punch with wind gusts reaching up to 70-plus mph.
The winds knocked down trees, damaged houses and affected traffic across Jacksonville and beyond.
On the Northside, a home security camera captured the moment winds uprooted a tree and sent it falling across a road.
Trees fell onto vehicles in the Avondale and Biltmore areas. And trees fell onto homes on the Westside and in Columbia County.
In Oceanway, a resident sent a photo of a tree that fell through their kitchen door near the intersection of Yellow Bluff Road and New Berlin Road.
Another video shared with News4JAX showed shingles flying off apartment building roofs into a parking lot at the Shore House Apartments in the Holiday Hill area.
In the Lackawanna area, there were power lines down and an uprooted tree fell onto a house. Police and firefighters responded to help people out of the damaged home.
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Once the morning storms were gone residents all over the city picked up the debris. One was Ronald Smart Sr..
“I’m used to seeing stuff like that happen,” he said.
The winds mangled his canopy.
On the Northwest side of the city, Kirk Bailey had a tree crash into his home while his fiancée was inside.
“The wind, the whistling and then boom. And it split the whole thing, you can see the outside from the inside,” she said.
This maple tree isn’t the first tree to topple over in front of their home. Now they want to get other trees cut down to prevent this from happening again with a future storm.
Off Dunn Avenue, Specialty Cartz and Partz had part of its metal roof ripped off by winds, but everyone was OK.
Here are some of the strongest reported winds in the area on Friday morning:
- 73 mph at the top of EverBank Stadium
- 66 mph at Mayport
- 65 mph at Huguenot Park
- 62 mph at Craig Airport
- 59 mph at NAS Jax
Jennifer Calendar was driving to work when the storm moved through Jacksonville.
“Everything was flying everywhere. My car was moving with the wind,” Calendar said.
The National Weather Service said it had no sustained rotation tracks as the squall line came through, but added that it’s possible there might’ve been some short-lived spin-ups, also called gustnadoes. The highest wind gusts were measured at 73 mph, but up on the Dames Point Bridge, it would been close to 80 mph.
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When the storms moved outcrews began to cut down trees and clean up.
And as the community cleaned up from the fast-moving storm, more patience will be needed for the thousands of customers waiting for their electricity to be restored from downed power lines.
Those power outages began Friday morning from as far as Tallahassee to Jacksonville.
The one good thing, temperatures will be much cooler due to the cold front so the heat will be easier to deal with while customers wait for the power to come back on.
