Firefighters are warning residents on Tuesday to flee or take shelter as they have been struggling to control bushfires in Victoria, eastern Australia. 

According to Jason Heffernan, chief officer of the state's Country Fire Authority, there were about 650 firefighters combating flames that covered 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres).

He also said that around East Gippsland, which is located around 250 kilometers (155 miles) east of Melbourne, wind gusts of up to 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour) have been reported.

Nine rural neighborhoods received evacuation orders from emergency services after it was determined that the fires "threatened homes and lives."

"It is proving to be quite difficult, burning in both private property but also in some pine plantations. So the next couple of hours will remain very challenging for firefighters on the ground," said Heffernan. 

Heffernan told Australian public broadcaster ABC that late in the afternoon, rain was predicted to assist douse the flames.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).