About 5,000 homes in the Augusta area were without power in the wake of this afternoon's thunderstorms, according to Georgia Power and SCE&G.

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About 1,500 Georgia Power customers were without power at 5:30 p.m., according to company spokeswoman Lynn Wallace. She said about 600 of those customers were along Wrightsboro Road.

Crews were working, but it could be several hours before power was restored to all customers, Wallace said.

In Aiken, Edgefield and Saluda counties, 3,507 customers were without power at 6 p.m., according the company's Web site.

Eric Boomhower, public affairs manager of SCE&G, had no estimate on how long it would take to restore power to all customers.

"Typically with summer storms, repairs are pretty quick," he said, although they cannot begin until lightning has passed through the area, Boomhower said.

At the Walmart Supercenter on Knox Avenue in North Augusta, the lights briefly flickered during the storm, then just the overhead lights remained on. The wide display of big-screen TVs went dark. The building's air-conditioner stopped cooling.

Store employees stretched yellow rope around the frozen food cases to keep customers from opening the doors.

Shoppers patiently waited in long lines at the checkout aisles for the power to be restored.

At 5 p.m. a Walmart employee asked customers to leave the store.

As employees hung blue tarps over the meat section to lock in the cool air, shoppers abandoned their buggies and walked to their cars.

Several counties in the Augusta area remain under a severe thunderstorm watch until 10 p.m., according to the National Weather Service Web site.

Included are Richmond, Columbia, Burke, McDuffie and Lincoln counties in Georgia and Aiken, Edgefield, McCormick, Barnwell and Bamberg counties in South Carolina.

The weather service said those storms could produce heavy rain, hail and localized flooding.

A Richmond County sheriff's dispatcher said there had been "a lot of accidents" in the area, although none involved injuries.

She said a traffic light at Highland and Central avenues was hanging on a power line.

Between 1 and 1.5 inches of rain fell in the area between 4 and 4:30 p.m., the weather service said. But the dispatcher said she had no reports of flooding.