Water was gushing into her home — up through the floors, up through the toilet, up through any gap at all — when Pat Lipham grabbed her two small dogs and crawled atop a dresser.

Outside, the water spun her car around and threw a porch bench on top of it. Then she felt her Gilmer County house unhinge from the foundation and start to move, stopping only when it hit a tree in the yard. Then, thankfully, firefighters with rafts busted through the door.

“Terrible,” said Lipham, 69, afterward, standing in two mismatched, soggy shoes.

The flash flooding that awoke people in Gilmer and Pickens counties Thursday was an isolated disaster. By 6 a.m., more than 6 inches of intense rain had hit creeks that were already swollen from a run of recent precipitation, sending water into communities where the earth was already sodden.

Normally, the streams are part of the natural beauty that draws many metro Atlantans to vacation or buy weekend retreats in the communities about 80 miles north of Atlanta. But Thursday morning they turned malevolent, breaking into people’s homes and trapping them there, sending their cars on destructive joyrides, and tearing up roads and trees.

No one was injured, but about 40 homes, almost all of them in eastern Gilmer County, suffered varying degrees of damage. Several, including Lipham’s, will probably have to be razed. More than 2,100 people lost power beginning around 10:30 Wednesday night, though most had it back by Thursday afternoon.

“The creek beds rose up so high, the water took the (electrical) poles down,” said Stacey Fields, spokeswoman for Amicalola Electric Membership Corp.

The Gilmer communities of Burnt Mountain and Homer Wright took the brunt of the hit. Even as Lipham was scrambling to find a safe place for the urn bearing her husband’s ashes, Howard and Sarah Gardner, were fighting their own battle across the street.

With water rising over their porch they called 911. Sarah stood on a porch bench as trees floated across the yard. A team of three Gilmer County firefighters had to row more than 200 yards against the rushing current to reach them.

Meanwhile, kids over at Gilmer’s Boys and Girls Club were evacuated to the middle school, where the Red Cross set up a shelter. If anything, they seemed to enjoy the adventure, playing games on the gym floor.

“They thought it was the coolest thing that had happened to them,” said club unit director Jan Day.

Only a few people came to the shelter and most were gone by Thursday afternoon, though officials decided to leave it open just in case people had trouble when they went home.

In Pickens County, two young men in a pickup were heading to remove some downed trees when the flood waters washed out the road and carried their truck about 100 feet into a stream, said Lt. Kris Stancil, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office. They stood in the truck bed until a rescue crew strung a line across the stream and carried them to safety.

Luckily for Lipham and her neighbors, Friday’s weather should be mostly sunny, said Channel 2 meteorologist David Chandley. Saturday promises partly cloudy skies, and Sunday carries a 40 percent chance of rain, he said.

After the waters receded, the Gardners returned to their home to find mud dunes covering their manicured lawn and a half dozen trees lying on their sides. The whereabouts of the refrigerator and heating oil tank were a mystery. (Later, the heating company contacted them to say it found their tank floating in the Coosawatee River.)

It wasn’t the first time nature had dealt Gilmer residents a watery blow, but it came as a shock nevertheless.

“The first time this happened, in 2004, we thought it was the 100-year flood,” Sarah Gardner said. “So we cancelled our flood insurance.”

Lipham spent the afternoon removing pictures and jewelry and other things she could salvage from her home on the banks of Clear Creek.

Tears came to her as she thought of the years she’d spent there with her husband, Mike, before he passed away in January. They had rebuilt much of the inside after the 2004 flood.

But this time, she said, “I’ll bulldoze it and be done.”