Ulster County cleaned up Thursday from a massive storm that brought down trees, damaged homes and caused flooding in some parts of the county. Crews were still working hard to restore power to thousands of customers and assess the damage.

Kingston residents like Mercedes Miranda were out surveying the damage Thursday morning after the severe storm ripped through Ulster County Wednesday night.

"The house, it was just like, it was shaking, so we were standing in our doorways," said Miranda.

Rain, hail and winds reaching top speeds of 60 to 80 mph rocked the county.

Lorrie Coppola in Kingston filmed video from her home. In just a few minutes, the storm created nearly blackout conditions.

Around parts of Kingston Thursday morning, it was hard to find one block that wasn’t affected.

A tree smashed the windshield of a car. Another crashed into a home’s backyard and chimney.

Central Hudson said at the peak of the storm 21,000 customers lost power. By the morning, over 11,000 were still in the dark. That’s about 13% of all of their customers in the county.

At around 4:30 p.m. Thursday, power had been restored to more than 16,000 customers in the Hudson Valley, leaving about 5,200 customers, mostly in Kingston, Hurley and Marbletown, without service.

"We had a really unprecedented, basically thunderstorm event called a straight-line wind event," said Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan. "Basically, a sheet a wall of wind and water like a tornado, but without the spin."

Residents said it sure felt like one.

"It was a solid five minutes of a lot of cracking, falling, a booming sound," said Kingston resident Katie Mini.

One neighbor on the block was not as lucky. Their car was crunched under the weight of several trees. Crews arrived on the scene Thursday to clean up the mess.

In response, the county set up an operations center and declared a state of emergency in the areas most affected, including Kingston, Marbletown, Esopus, Hurley and the Town of Ulster.

Kingston also declared its own state of emergency, restricting all unnecessary travel.

The county and the governor’s office also mobilized additional street crews to help cleanup.

"The main purpose is to minimize vehicle traffic because we still have very dangerous power lines down that are active," said Ryan.

Kingston also set up cooling centers at the Salvation Army and Fair Street Church for anyone who needed to cool off or just charge their phones.