10:25

John and Lucy Van Hoof evacuated from their caravan to an auditorium of the Tuncurry Bowling Club. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

The auditorium of the Tuncurry Bowling Club is filling up with air mattresses.

“Kmart sent them down, we just got a whole other load of them,” Lauren Whitty told me earlier.

“I think we’ve got plenty, but they’ve told us to expect more people later. I don’t know, to be honest I don’t know what most of these people have been through. We’re just trying to make them comfortable.

At the moment, there’s about 80 people from around the southern end of the mid-north coast who have found their way here tonight.

John and Lucy Van Hoof live in a caravan park on the outskirts of Tuncurry. They were told to leave at about 4pm this afternoon.

“There was smoke everywhere, we could see it all coming up over the hill,” Lucy told me.

“We’ve been here 23 years and I’ve never seen anything like it, when they told us to leave I thought ‘I’d rather leave now than wait’.”

Whitty, together with a group of friends, helped organise the evacuation centre at the club through a Facebook page.

“We just put out a call for help and we’ve had people from Sydney, Newcastle and some of the locals wanting to donate things. For a while we were like, ‘oh, we don’t know where to send everything’,” she said.

As we sit here more people are filing in, most of them elderly. An RFS organiser told us they’re expecting more to come after 10pm, once the wind picks up.