Multiple local agencies responded to the heavy weather damage at Langdale Forestry.

VALDOSTA — Sudden, heavy weather hit Langdale Forest Products yesterday, heavily damaging three buildings and injuring seven people on site.

The sudden storm hit Langdale Forest Products between 11:15 and 11:45 a.m., moving south through the facility.

A quick, multi-agency response from City of Valdosta and Lowndes County departments, EMS and Georgia State Patrol accounted for everyone at Langdale Forestry and extricated the wounded while several concerned family members of Langdale Forest Products workers gathered at the perimeter set by local police departments, making cell phone calls to check on Langdale Forest Products workers.

Four of those injured were transported to South Georgia Medical Center.

“We had four patients,” said Jeremy Normal, assistant chief of clinical and educational services with South Georgia Medical Center EMS.

One of the serious patients was trapped in a building and had to be extricated by firefighters.

Along with three buildings that suffered major damage, there was also damage to materials, automobiles, equipment and other structures at Langdale Forest Products. The heavy weather event flung debris as far as the Winn-Dixie parking lot on Madison Highway.

It is unconfirmed as a possible tornado.

“At this time, we can’t confirm this was a tornado,” said Ashley Tye, director of Lowndes County Emergency Management. “For that to take place, the National Weather Service would have to send a team down to assess the damage and assess whether or not this was a tornado. A lot of times, you see damage and it doesn’t meet the criteria for a tornado.”

Tye also addressed the suddenness of the event.

“We really did not see this coming. There was nothing indicated on the radar in advance of this. This literally popped up out of nowhere.”

Greg Forbes, a severe weather expert with The Weather Channel, talked about the event on his Facebook account, calling it “a fluke storm or tornado,” saying, “no thunderstorms in the USA, yet with a strong updraft in a rain shower, enough to convert the low-level wind shear into a possible tornado!”

Representatives from The National Weather Service are scheduled to inspect damage on site today to determine whether the event was a tornado.

“We don’t have any significant outages,” said Audrey King with Georgia Power. “We do have a few isolated cases, and we’re working on that, but it’s nothing major that we’re seeing.”

This is the second major weather event to hit Valdosta in the last week, with a tornado striking near Interstate 75 off of exit 16 last Tuesday.