A suspected tornado hit Montgomery, Alabama by surprise early Wednesday morning, wreaking damage on local homes and businesses and overturning cars.

A tornado warning for the county was issued the very same minute the shock storm arrived in the early hours of the morning, remaining in effect until 4:15am.

While the storm caused no fatalities, over 50 buildings have been reported damaged, and two minor injuries sustained.

Images from the scene show streets strewn with debris and blocked by uprooted trees, with local journalist Mike Cason sharing distressing footage of trashed homes and cars on a suburban street. Houses' roofs have been ripped off, leaving bare beams and gaping holes, as detached walls bow outwards. 

At the home of local resident Tara Williams, felled trees destroyed two front bedrooms and tore off the roof. 

Although no one in the house was seriously injured, one tree actually landed directly on her son's bed as he lay sleeping. Forced to crawl out from beneath it in order to escape, he very luckily emerged with only minor head injuries from the falling debris.

Rodney Penn, already out clearing debris on Wednesday morning, was fortunate enough to avoid any structural damage to his apartment, yet emerged to discover a tree limb had busted out the windows of his wife's car. 

At home during the storm, he described it to the Montgomery Advertiser as sounding like 'a thousand baseball bats hitting the side of the house at the same time.'

Elsewhere in town, video footage from early hours of the morning shows vans flipped on their sides and car bonnets crushed beneath tumbled tree trunks. 

In the light of day, a group of volunteers at Buddy Watson Baseball Park attempted to move what appeared to be a fallen set of floodlights, now firmly planted into the adjoining sidewalk. 

Emergency crews in hi-viz jackets were stationed across the city, surveying damage and beginning to remove debris and road blockages. 

The storm, which the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service has not yet confirmed as a tornado, was very sudden. Montgomery Alabama Emergency Management Agency Director Christina Thornton was monitoring the radar with a colleague when it arrived. 

'We were sitting there watching the radar' she told the Montgomery Advertiser, when he said '"Look at this, this is Alexander City, and look there's one right here in Montgomery. Oh my god that looks like a tornado," It was that quick.'

Given the structural damage left by by the storm, it is 'miraculous that only a couple of minor injuries have been reported,' Chip Hill, Chief of Staff for Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, told AL Alabama.

The Montgomery 'tornado' is one of many winter storms marching across the South this week. Other storms were reported in Georgia and other Alabama counties later in the morning, leaving damaged properties and roads in their wake. 

A storm near Sandersville, Georgia left one person injured, ripping the roof of a house, and flipping a semitractor-trailer. 

On Tuesday, the same storm system also caused flooding and damage in Kentucky and Mississippi.

 The West Coast is bracing for another massive storm as an 'atmospheric river' - a high-altitude current of dense moisture - is expected to bring drenching rains and renewed flooding to northern and central California, starting on Wednesday.

Heavy snow was also forecast to return to the Sierra Nevada mountains on Wednesday, along with coastal rain and higher-elevation snow in the Pacific Northwest.

Northern California is still recovering from a weekend Pacific storm that triggered floods, mudslides, power outages, and road closures.

This time, the high winds accompanying the latest batch of impending downpours could uproot trees and knock down tree limbs, causing more blackouts.

As many as 10,000 homes and businesses in northern California were without electricity early on Tuesday night, data from poweroutage.us showed.

San Francisco appears to be directly in the firing line and is bracing for the storm to be catastrophic after it was already deluged with floods and mudslides on New Year's Eve. 

'This will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while,' the National Weather Service's Bay Area office said. 'This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at and needs to be taken seriously.

'The impacts will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce, and the worst of all, likely loss of human life.' 

The first round of rain is expected to move into the region early on Wednesday morning with the second wave arriving between 2 and 9pm.