A powerful noon storm Thursday ripped the roof off a car wash, overwhelmed sewer systems, pelted cars with damaging hail, knocked out power and frazzled motorists caught in the brief, but fierce blast of weather.

Lisa Kerchner of Rock Island had just finished getting her hair cut near Wal-Mart in Moline when the storm hit. As she began to back out of her parking spot, the skies opened up "and it just came down, hail and everything," she said. "It was a pretty scary experience."

Sheets of rain made it impossible to see out of her windshield, and the sound of hail bouncing off her vehicle frightened her. "It was very noisy, and I thought my windows were going to break."

At a car wash at 16th Street and 38th Avenue in Moline, the winds, which the National Weather Service clocked at speeds as high as 65 mph, yanked the roof off the building and sent it crashing into a nearby McDonald's parking lot, where it struck a couple of cars, Moline Police Lt. Mike Roman said. Nobody was injured, he said.

Meanwhile, the runoff from the 30-minute storm, which a weather service meteorologist said dumped as much as 2 inches of rain in some areas, poured into roads and storm sewers, flooding intersections and causing creeks to rise rapidly. Water squirted out of manholes in parts of Davenport, police Cpl. Andrew Waggoner said.

There were widespread reports of cars disabled in pools of water during the flash flood, particularly near the Great Escape Theater at John Deere Road and 38th Street in Moline and St. Ambrose University at Locust and Gaines streets in Davenport.

In Bettendorf, the city had to begin pumping raw sewage into the river at about 5 p.m. because the wastewater treatment plan in Davenport had become overloaded, Bettendorf Public Works Director Wally Mook said. Bettendorf shares the plant with Davenport, Panorama Park and Riverdale.

"Right now we're getting a heck of a lot of water coming into the system," Mook said. "Groundwater is totally saturated and it's getting into the sanitary system."

After the storm ended about 12:45 p.m., more than 4,000 MidAmerican Energy customers in the Quad-Cities were without power, mostly in Moline, but electricity had been mostly restored by evening.

Tom Philip, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Davenport, called the tempest a "very strong, super-cell storm." Two miles north of Coal Valley, Ill., the winds blew a semitrailer out of its lane of traffic, he said.

Philip said the service received reports of golf ball-sized hail falling in Moline, Coal Valley and one mile southwest of Cordova, Ill.

Chris Younggren, general sales manager for Mills Chevrolet near SouthPark Mall in Moline, said vehicles on his lot sustained minor hail damage but he did not have a dollar estimate.