Storm sweeps through Sydney, four people in hospital after lightning ...

About 13,000 households and businesses around Balgowlah and Seaforth were left in a blackout after the storm damaged electricity services, provider Ausgrid said, due to an overhead power line that ran between Beacon Hill and Allambie being hit.

“Our crews are on the ground and will work to restore power as soon as it’s safe to do so,” the company said.

Traffic lights were also blacked out on Kenneth Road and Condamine Street at Manly Vale.

And several thousand homes and businesses had outages in Hornsby, Turramurra, Thornleigh and Belrose.

All outages were all caused by lightning strikes, said an Ausgrid spokesperson. “Just like a house has a trip system … when lightning hits a part of a network it automatically trips and turns off so we can inspect for any physical damage before we re-energise,” a spokesperson said.

Ausgrid expected service to return to the area by the evening.

The Bureau of Meteorology said an “upper trough and series of surface troughs” were causing the city’s slow-moving thunderstorms.

Jake Phillips, a senior meteorologist with the bureau, said the storms were “coming in off the sea from the south-east and pushing in towards the north from the north-west”.

“They have dumped some pretty heavy falls,” he told 2GB, warning of further heavy rainfall across the afternoon. The rain is “likely to persist for the next little while”, he said.

The heaviest falls were recorded in Kings Langley, in Sydney’s north-west, which had 48 millimetres of rain in an hour.

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As the dramatic weather unfolded, anxious fans were tracking Taylor Swift’s jet as it was approaching Sydney, though she landed safely just before 1.30pm. One runway at Kingsford Smith was damaged in the storms, causing departure delays of about one hour. It has since reopened.

An SES spokesman said Castle Hill, in Sydney’s north-west, was bearing the brunt of the bad weather with multiple calls for help to flooded homes.

An automatic flash flooding alarm was triggered on Bexley Road in Earlwood.

NSW SES Assistant Commissioner Sean Kearns said falls could reach up to 100 millimetres up the coast.

“The NSW SES has prepositioned personnel throughout the region, and we are well-resourced to respond to any calls for assistance,” he said.

“I would encourage the public to follow the advice of emergency service personnel on the ground and not to drive through floodwater.”