Severe storms brought major damage to neighborhoods across the Baltimore region Friday afternoon. 

“I saw it get really super dark, and I saw clouds that looked like it could have been a tornado, but I’m not a weather person, so I don’t know,” said Dorothea Woods, a Dundalk resident.  

The thunderstorms came on fast, toppling huge trees onto fences, roadways, and cars. 

“There’s my car, crushed by a tree!” Jeff Finucane, a Federal Hill resident, said. 

“My husband looked out the window and saw this 80-foot pine tree swaying in the air, and not even ten minutes later it came crashing down,” Dundalk’s Candice Fulton said. 

Also in Dundalk, strong winds tossed around a trampoline, ripped the siding off of homes, tore a roof off, and somehow blew a hole through the side of an apartment building. 

Downed power lines even ended up in a neighbor’s pool. 

In Canton, the storm took the roof off of the Merritt Club and littered the sidewalk with debris. 

Authorities respond 

City authorities said they were dealing with widespread damage, outages, and road closures during a media briefing on Friday night. 

“In terms of trees down, we have approximately 20, with about 8 roads completely blocked. Our forestry crews have been working on that since the start of this storm. We look to have those streets opened up by sometime later this evening,” a member of the Office of Emergency Management for Baltimore City said. 

The National Weather Service announced that they plan to survey some of the hardest-hit areas on Saturday morning. 

According to BGE, the storms left nearly 60,000 customers without power, damaging equipment all across central Maryland, with the hardest hit areas in Howard, Carroll, Baltimore Counties, and Baltimore City. 

BGE asks customers to report outages either:

• Online at BGE.com
• On BGE’s free mobile app, available at the Apple Store or Google Play
• Via text message to 69243  
• Or by phone, by calling 877-778-2222