Yesterday?s lightning storm and torrential downpours caused flooding and power outages and will lead to delays in the delivery of mail.

The storm began at approximately 10 a.m. and 2.2 inches of rain poured down before 3 p.m. amid crackling lightning and thunder.

Belco reported that four circuits were damaged during the lightning storm and one was still down as of mid-day. The downed circuit resulted in a power outage in parts of Pembroke, Southampton and Somerset. Schools and a number of Government Departments were without power as a result as were many stores and homes.

One Spanish Point resident arrived home to an unwelcome surprise, lightning had struck his boundary wall and caused parts of it to break away.

?I couldn?t believe it when I got home,? Brandon Robinson said. ?The lightning blew my boundary wall into pieces.?

His insurance company is coming to the residence today to survey the damage.

The storm also caused flooding in certain areas including the Bermuda Mail Processing Centre. As a result the centre had to shut down and mail will be delayed.

?A full damage assessment will be carried out once the rain has stopped,? Postmaster General George Outerbridge said yesterday. ?We want to make sure that our staff is safe once they return to work. Once we are satisfied of that, we will work hard to process and deliver the backlog in mail as quickly and efficiently as possible.?

The Corporation of Hamilton said that several traffic lights did not work yesterday because of the power outage, including lights at the junctions of Court Street and Reid Street and Burnaby Street and Front Street.

One wet motorist, who did not wish to be named, said the roads were chaos.

?No one seemed to know what they were doing,? the lady said.

?People were edging forward. I drove past the Cabinet building, through two sets of broken lights. People seemed to be giving way to people on their right.

?There was certainly a lot of confusion. I didn?t know what I was doing. It was quite nerve-racking.?

The Fire Service was also busy after the torrential rain ? answering 21 calls. Eleven of those were flood-related and required the service to pump excess water out of buildings. The remaining calls were false fire alarms.

Lightning can cause some fire alarms to activate.

While neither the Police Service nor the Fire Service reported any injuries associated with the downpours, one casualty of the wet weather was a horse taking visitors around the streets of Hamilton in a carriage late yesterday evening.

As the rain picked up again around 9 p.m., the horse slipped on Par-La-Ville Road and lay on the road for a few minutes until it was unbridled from the carriage and able to regain its feet.

The Hymann family from Pennsylvania were shocked by the horse?s sudden collapse and said they had taken such rides before but never experienced a horse falling before.

The family walked back to their cruise ship as the horse regained its feet and was strapped back onto its carriage.

Luckily, today is expected to be mostly sunny, according to the Bermuda Weather Service.