Jason Winters & Lamar Canada

SUMMERVILLE, Ga. — Businessmen, home owners and county officials say it is still too early to accurately estimate damage caused by a tornado that sheared trees, shifted roofs, smashed windows and destroyed a mobile home on Friday.

But all agree the town was blessed because no one was injured when the storm struck shortly after 5 p.m. on Good Friday.

“As a business, we’re insured and will be taken care of, but I feel so sorry for the woman whose home was destroyed,” said Lee Rodgers, owner of Chattooga Car Care, which was heavily damaged by the storm.

Sole Commissioner Jason Winters said the National Weather Service confirmed the storm was an EF2 tornado on the Fujita scale of tornado intensity, meaning its winds were in the 113-157 mph range.

“Our local emergency response folks held an organized tabletop drill in March with a scenario that an F2 tornado hit downtown Summerville,” Mr. Winters said, noting the actual storm touched down about one-quarter mile north of downtown. “Thirty minutes into this thing, we knew where our teams needed to be.”

It will take several days, possibly weeks, before structural inspections are complete and the dollar cost of the tornado is known, he said.

Mr. Rodgers said he had just begun to close Chattooga Car Care’s doors so the rain wouldn’t come in when, “Whoosh! It was gone.” The blast of wind jammed the heavy roll-up door in its tracks and within seconds had toppled the building’s entire north-facing brick wall and steel-framed windows.

“I looked out and saw things flying — sheet metal, 2x4s, debris — around about 500 feet up, heading east. It was like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ except there weren’t any cows,” Mr. Rodgers said.

Nothing in the shop, including a restored 1949 Ford coupe originally owned by movie star Clark Gable, was touched during the “no-more-than-five second” blast Friday, but high winds in the predawn hours Sunday pitched four more plate-glass windows from building out onto Commerce Street, he said.

Erick Housch said he was working at United Community Bank on Friday when the sky grew dark and wind began to howl.

“We thought about getting in the bank’s vault,” he said.

Though the bank was spared, Mr. Housch returned to discover that his home on Bittings Avenue had been damaged. Tall pines were sheared a dozen feet above the ground and a large tree had blown over, destroying the deck at the back of his house.

The combination of downed trees and power lines made it difficult to immediately assess damages, but most businesses in the hardest hit section of U.S. 27 — Commerce Street through Summerville — were insured by the same agent: Tony Jones of Flegal Insurance, whose office was closed for Good Friday.

“My wife, her sister and the kids were in Rome to see the new Hannah Montana movie when they stopped the film because so many parents were coming to pick up their kids due to the storm,” Mr. Jones said. “I was on the phone with her when I started getting the calls about the tornado.”

A construction company from Rome rolled into town about 5:30 p.m. Saturday and workers raced to secure tarps on damaged roofs before any more heavy weather moved into the area, according to Alan Bryant, one of the sons in Bryant & Sons Lumber Co.

The lumber company’s roof was picked up, shifted about two feet and dropped back onto the building, Mr. Bryant said. Nothing collapsed, but steel vent pipes punched holes in the roof while stacks of lumber were picked up and blown across the highway and into nearby buildings and yards.

“We got off lucky,” Mr. Bryant said. “It might be a couple of weeks before we can reopen, but it isn’t something that we can’t rebuild.”