Firefighters were investigating the cause of the fire Wednesday night.
A tree fell across Bester Street during heavy winds around 6 p.m., damaging a house and crushing a pickup truck, Hagerstown Fire Department Battalion Chief Randy Myers said.
The tree brought down power lines and pulled over a utility pole, Myers said.
Officials blocked off the 200 block of South Locust Street while the city turned off power to the downed lines. The portion of the tree blocking Bester Street was scheduled to be cleared this morning, and public works manager Eric Deike said the street should be reopened by 10 a.m.
Tara Wilson said she saw the tree fall and heard a loud "boom" as the tree appeared to shift the whole house.
"It looked like a twister came through," said Scott Hines, who also lives on Locust Street. "It was raining pretty good, and all of a sudden the wind just whipped up like crazy. There were trees falling and limbs flying through my yard."
At one point during the storm, five city traffic signals were out, a Hagerstown Police Department dispatcher said. Washington County emergency dispatchers received 11 calls about downed power lines, mostly in the city.
The city had scattered power outages throughout the West End and North End, city spokeswoman Karen Giffin said. About 300 city customers lost power, Giffin said, but all were expected to have it back by early this morning.
In the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, the storm knocked out power to 4,100 Allegheny Power customers in Martinsburg, W.Va. That number later dropped to 1,700 customers who were expected to have their service restored by about 10:30 p.m., Allegheny Power spokesman David Neurohr said.
The outages occurred in the north, central and southwest sections of the city, Neurohr said.
Streetlights and stoplights along at least four blocks of Queen Street and even more on West King Street to Winchester Avenue were out.
A transformer fire reported near Faulkner and Winchester avenues knocked out electricity to areas south of West John Street.
Berkeley County emergency dispatchers said they alerted authorities to dozens of 911 calls, including reports of wires and trees down and an air conditioner fire.
Franklin County, Pa., 911 dispatchers reported limbs and wires down on both Williamsport Pike and Redwood Drive in Antrim Township.
Staff writers Dave McMillion, Matthew Umstead and Jennifer Fitch contributed to this story.
