Fire has hit a Victorian coastal holiday town and people are being told to go into the water as warning sirens sound. "Everyone is hopefully down on the foreshore in the water," Don Ashby told ABC on Tuesday morning as emergency sirens sounded. The fire has cut power to the town, with AusNet Services reporting 5700 properties in East Gippsland without electricity due to the fires, and another 1800 in northeast Victoria also down. "It's not pleasant, it's pitch dark here and the emergency vehicles have disappeared from sight," resident and local community radio presenter Francesca Winterson told ABC Gippsland. Incident controller Chris Eagle told ABC Gippsland that lightning in the region sparked hundreds of new fires overnight.

Source: Otago Daily Times December 30, 2019 22:18 UTC