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A clean-up is underway this morning after a mini tornado ripped through the Waikato town of Cambridge overnight, bringing down trees, powerlines and damaging scores of houses.
Emergency services said they received around 30 calls between 3am and 3.30am, when the tornado travelled in a near straight line through the middle of the town.
The Fire Service said up to 100 houses have been affected.
A watermain burst at the Oakdale Resthome on Tennyson St, causing flood damage to several residents' rooms.
No one is believed to have been hurt but Cambridge chief fire officer Don Gerrand, said damage was widespread and many homes and parts of Cambridge were without power at first light.
Mr Gerrand, said the town's volunteer firefighters responded within minutes but power was cut to the fire station and torches were needed. Communications were not affected as radios went to battery power.
"It is the biggest we have had here. A hotel lost its roof, so did the BP Service station and an old folks' home.
"It has created a bit of destruction right through from one end of the town to the other."
Mr Gerrand said within five minutes the tornado had gone, leaving firefighters astounded at the damage.
"An 80-year-old oak tree was just plucked out of the ground."
He said the power of nature was very scary,.
"One resident had a budgie aviary and it is no longer there – or the budgies. It is not even on his section," Mr Gerrand said.
Damage was mostly to iron roofs with sheets of long run iron ripped off.
"There is (roofing) iron hanging out of trees, power lines, all over the place."
He said heavier concrete tile roofs seem to have mostly been left intact.
- With NZPA
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