WIND gusts of more than 80km/h wreaked havoc in Orange on Friday night and Saturday morning, felling trees and leading to power outages across the city.
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A weather warning issued for Friday appeared to be a false alarm when the strongest daytime gusts barely breached 40km/h.
But at 1.20am on Saturday the winds recorded at Orange Airport were 83km/h, the strongest at the site since December 2013.
State Emergency Services Orange controller Kim Stevens said crews were called to 25 jobs on Friday night and another 30 on Saturday morning, mostly to clear fallen trees or branches.
“It’s spread right across the area. We had teams out from 7pm last night [Friday] to 7am Saturday morning,” Mr Stevens said.
“We’ve had another team go out and we had a request to get a team out from Molong.
“By far the majority of call outs are fallen trees which have been uprooted.”
Some of the biggest trees to fall in the city were in Clinton Street, Byng Street, Kite Street, Paul Park near the Robin Hood Hotel, in the carpark of the Orange Hockey Centre and at the OCTEC facility at the intersection of Summer and Park streets.
Essential Energy northern community relations manager David Crough said extra crews were brought in from out of the area to help restore power to areas affected across the Central West, including Bathurst and Oberon.
“We hope to have power back on today, some of the extra crews are already here,” Mr Crough said on Saturday.
Mr Crough said the outages included one at 5.48pm on Friday when 1211 residences and premises, including McDonalds and KFC, were left without power along the Bathurst Road area of east Orange .
He said by 9pm on Friday power had been restored to 1141 customers and by 10.25pm power was restored to all customers in that area.
However, the power outages also affected other sites across the city and outlying areas.
Mr Crough said at 12.30pm on Saturday there were still 2900 customers without electricity in NSW, including 1840 in the northern region, which includes Orange, Bathurst and Oberon.
It seems there may be more similar weather on the way.
“Expect gusty winds throughout Monday and into Tuesday,” Weatherzone meteorologist Craig McIntosh warned.
