JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A strong cold front that killed at least four people, injured several others and knocked out power to more than 100,000 homes and businesses across the Southeast is swept through our area Thursday evening.
This week’s warm weather helped fuel the strong weather that began to reach Lake City and Southeast Georgia just after sunset and will move through metro Jacksonville by midnight.
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The storm has passed but locations in Southeast Georgia and Northeast Florida experienced heavy rainfall and damaging winds up to 70 mph Thursday night. This resulted in multiple reports of trees down, power lines down, and damage to homes.
You can find your local power outages here.
The storm has left its mark across the Southeast as it has moved towards us. More than 172,000 customers were without power across the South, according to poweroutage.us.
One person was killed and another was injured as high winds destroyed two mobile homes near the town of Demopolis, Alabama, the Storm Prediction Center reported. The winds left roadsides in that area strewn with pieces of plywood and insulation, broken trees and twisted metal. The National Weather Service was checking the site for signs of a tornado.
A driver died in South Carolina when a tree fell on an SUV near the town of Fort Mill, authorities said.
In Pickens, Mississippi, the ceiling caved in and furniture flew around 64-year-old Emma Carter, but she considers herself lucky after surviving another apparent tornado, which decimated her mobile home.
Flooding, meanwhile, forced rescuers to suspend their search for a vehicle that disappeared with a person inside it in north Alabama’s Buck’s Pocket State Park.
In Georgia, a tree crashed onto the interstate in Dunwoody, north of Atlanta, crunching a car but causing no serious injuries, authorities said. Huge trees toppled and snapped in the state's northwestern Gordon County, smashing a home and blowing roofs off outbuildings.
Students were told to shelter in place while tornado warnings were in effect in the Atlanta suburbs and at the University of Georgia in Athens. Children in the Lawrenceville area huddled in school hallways as the weather moved through.
In southern West Virginia, residents at a nursing home were asked to remain inside after a road leading directly into the facility buckled during heavy rains.
The airport in North Carolina’s largest city evacuated a control tower and advised people to shelter in place because of a tornado warning. Charlotte-Douglas International Airport later tweeted that an inspection of its airfield showed no damage. More than 400 flights into and out of the airport were canceled Thursday.
MORE ONLINE: Current conditions/interactive radar | Winter storm brings snow, wind, hail, flooding across US