Lightning not to blame in 1 Gwinnett fire

Gwinnett firefighters are saying what they believed to have been a lightning strike was not the case.

Tuesday afternoon firefighters smelled smoke inside the attic of a home on John Landings Way in Lawrenceville.

Officials originally thought the cause was lightning but later determined the cause to be a light blast of a light fixture that shorted out and caused the haze of smoke.

Firefighters did find a a number of small fires inside a home on Pine Road in Dacula.

According to officials, lightning traveled into the home via the electrical wiring and sparked a fire in three separate areas near electrical outlets.

According to the National Weather Service, a series of pop-up thunderstorms hit the Cobb, Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett areas Tuesday morning.

The storms began around 10:30 a.m. and brought heavy rain and lightning, said Mike Leary, weather service forecaster. They hit their peak around 1 p.m. in the Northside, moving east, and began to taper off around 4 p.m.

An occupant was in the home at the time of the incident. The fires were quickly extinguished.

No injuries have been reported in either incident.

There is a 30 percent chance of scattered pop-up thunderstorms including heavy rain and lightning throughout the metro area, according to the National Weather Service. The storms are expected to move rather quickly through the area.