A FREAK storm lit up the skies of West Devon for more than an hour over the weekend providing a lightning spectacle — but while many watched on in amazement, others were busy assessing damage that had been caused to homes and businesses.

The dramatic event, which saw almost constant lightning strikes in the space of an hour, heavy rainfall and even hail, took place in the early hours of Saturday morning, with many people waking up to record video footage of the scenes and share it across social media platforms.

However, as many watched on in wonder, others had to tackle lightning and water damage as a result of the storm.

Firefighters from Tavistock Fire Station were busy on hand attending call outs in Monksmead and Highbank Close, where lightning had struck underground cables, causing fires in electrical sockets in a number of houses.

They were called to one property in Monksmead and after moving the family of three to safety, found there had been a fire in the ground floor of the house. Smoke damage was caused to the property and a further eight properties were also involved due to the lightning strikes.

A spokesperson for Tavistock Fire Station said: ‘It was a busy night for the fire service due to the thunder storm in the early hours of Saturday. We were turned out to a call in Monksmead of smoke in a property. When in attendance, it was found that the lightning had caused a fire in an electrical socket. While in attendance a further eight properties also reported BT boxes blowing and problems with electrics. After further investigation, it was found the lightning strike had hit a BT point in the ground causing the problems.’

Staff at Tavistock’s Fairway Furniture branch had a shock when they arrived at the store to open on Saturday morning and found that it had been inundated by thousands of gallons of rainwater from the heavy deluge during the storm, collapsing large parts of the internal ceiling and causing a significant amount of damage to the building and show stock.

When assistant store manager Jon Hoyles arrived to open the store on Saturday morning, he found that large sections of the store’s internal ceiling had collapsed to the showroom floor, with hundreds of display items destroyed and areas of the floor underwater.

Immediately putting into place the company’s emergency response plan, flood restorations specialists were on site within three hours to start removing the debris, complete the extraction of the rainwater and hygienically steam clean the carpet. Working with the staff, by 8pm on Saturday the store was ready to reopen on the Sunday, having lost just a day’s trading.

Speaking after the clean-up operation, Jon Hoyles said: ‘This is the type of situation you dread as a manager, but working with the head office management team, the Tavistock store staff and the specialists, we were able to re-open within 24 hours to continue to provide our customers with the best possible service, despite having lost about 15 per cent of the store’s display stock. We’d like to thank our loyal customers for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience when we had to close for the day last Saturday.

‘We expect to have the damage to the building fully repaired by the start of June, with the replacement display products due to arrive by the end of June.’

A couple of traders in Tavistock Pannier Market also suffered damage due to the heavy rainfall making its way through the market roof.

Market reeve Duane Carruthers said: ‘The market is a Victorian building and during extremely heavy rainfall it will leak in places, due to the Victorian box gutters being unable to cope with torrential rain, which led to a few traders experiencing stock damage. This really reiterates the importance of the planned restoration of the market roof in early 2018.’

Water also got into light fittings at the Conservative Club and into The Queen’s Head, Wetherspoons.

Visit the Tavistock?Times Facebook page for videos of the storm.