The city of Albany is recovering from a sudden high wind and rainstorm.
Thursday evening, a fast moving pop up thunder cell left 18,000 without power, uprooted scores of trees and damaged several buildings. No injuries were reported. Mayor Kathy Sheehan urges residents to keep a watchful eye on the sky all weekend long.
"These storms can be very severe, very unpredictable," Sheehan said. "It is unfortunate that we had this incident happen right when alive at a five was occurring. We had moved that to the rain site. We certainly had storms come through, but this was really severe. And then to see that, we had a partial building collapse, some roofs damaged, damage to the roof of St Joseph's church, trees down, power lines down. This really wreaked a lot of havoc in a very short period of time. And so people need to heed the warnings when they see lightning, hear that thunder, need to make sure that they have a plan to keep themselves safe."
The National Weather Service forecasts the potential for scattered thunderstorms and strong winds through Monday.
