Atlanta weather | Clean-up begins from Monday's storms

By Mike Morris, John Spink and Alexis Stevens

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tuesday’s sunny skies gave Gwinnett County residents affected by Monday’s severe storms a chance to reflect on close calls and begin the process of moving on after their homes were heavily damaged.

Claudio Timoftica, a nursing student at Kennesaw State University, was doing homework in the living room of a house on Guardian Way near Lawrenceville when a nearby lightning strike sent a 50-foot pine tree crashing through the roof.

He said there as a “big strike of lightning,” which “scared me, and I stood up, and right as I stood up, the tree came through the house. That was a surreal thing to witness.”

Timoftica and his roommate, who owns the home and was taking a shower when the tree fell, both escaped injury.

“That tree is sitting on my bed, so if I was on my bed, I would be toast right now,” Timoftica told the AJC.

Tuesday, Timoftica was “going through the house to see what I can salvage, that doesn’t have water damage from the rain."

“For two hours, it just rained straight into the house,” he said. “It was a swimming pool throughout.”

Timoftica said he had just moved into the house about a month ago, “and now I’m moving out.”

Also in Gwinnett, a mother and teenage daughter inside a large two-story home in Snellville made it out safely during a fire on Tree Lane. The blaze was sparked by an apparent lightning strike, Gwinnett fire Capt. Tommy Rutledge said.

Peggy Gargiulo said she was just starting to cook dinner a few minutes before 6 when, “I heard this big boom, and a little spark came out of the electrical switch.”

Gargiulo said her alarm system “made a noise, but it didn’t go off.”

She called her alarm-monitoring service and was told that their system wasn’t indicating an obvious fire.

“Then my daughter came down and said, ‘I smell smoke, mom, the house is on fire,” Gargiulo told the AJC.

“I got the extinguisher from the kitchen, ran upstairs to the attic and I could see the fire blazing already,” she said. “I used the extinguisher and it put it out for a second, then it was blazing again.”

Gargiulo and her teenage daughter got out safely, along with their two dogs and rabbit, but the fate of the family’s cat was still unknown Tuesday morning.

The damage from Monday afternoon’s squall line of fast-moving storms wasn’t confined to Gwinnett County.

In Cherokee County, winds pushed a tree onto a home in the Kellogg Creek area in Acworth.

Duwain and Linda Utter were both home Monday when a tree crashed onto the house, destroying the front door and its frame and smashing the living room roof.

"The tree fell right in front of me," Duwain Utter told the AJC.

Linda Utter sustained a bruise on her left arm, but the couple is otherwise fine, Duwain Utter said. The couple planned to stay in their home Monday night after the power company confirmed that there was no electrical damage, he said.

Metro Atlantans will get a breather for a few days from rain and storms, forecasters said.

Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Karen Minton is predicting sunny skies for Tuesday through Thursday, with highs in the 60s and lows in the 30s and 40s.

Clouds will be on the increase on Friday, and there's a 60 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms Saturday night, but so far, there's no indication that those storms will be severe.

During the height of Monday’s storms, about 15,000 Georgia Power customers were without electricity, but service was restored quickly for most customers as the rain and winds swept through. A spokeswoman for the utility said all power was back on by around 3 a.m. Tuesday.

The weather also affected air travelers at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Departure delays hit two hours and all incoming flights were temporarily halted, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.

Flight schedules had returned to normal Tuesday morning, with no delays reported by the FAA.

In the northwest corner of the state, the high winds brought trees down on a handful of houses in Dade and Whitfield counties, but no injuries were reported.

Hail up to 1.25 inches in diameter was reported in several counties as the storms swept into the state from the northwest.