Red Cross is launching an appeal to help those affected by the weekend's floods - a disaster the organisation has labelled the worst to strike New Zealand since the Canterbury earthquakes.

Around 1500 people in Canterbury are likely to remain without power overnight, after a snow storm battered the region today.

Heavy rain has kept Hokitika residents awake through the night with serious flooding causing many people, including 20 retirement home residents, to be evacuated.

A decade-long project to save endangered giant snails from a West Coast coal mine will finish next year.

A Hokitika bus driver has been charged after six-year-old primary schoolboy became jammed in a bus door and dragged along a road.

A Canadian tramper who fell and dislocated his shoulder, forcing him to crawl for 10 hours to reach shelter, has been rescued eight days after his ordeal began.

Glass and hot embers blasted out of an enclosed fireplace at a Hokitika home last night after a can was accidentally thrown on the fire and exploded.

A rental car driven by a tourist smashed through the plate glass window of a Hokitika automotive workshop, giving workers a fright and causing $40,000 of damage.

A Hokitika woman caught drink-driving at four times the limit had a baby in the car with her, police said today.

Specialist equipment from around the world has started arriving in Hokitika for the fitout on Westland Milk Products' $102 million nutritions drier project.

The details of an "appalling" incident of a child riding on the roof of a Dunedin vehicle on a West Coast road will be sent to Dunedin police today for further investigation.

An elderly NZ Post rural mail contractor in Hokitika was seriously injured after being run over by her own vehicle last night.

A coroner is calling for better safety standards at gold mining sites after the death of a 9-year-old boy.

A Hokitika teenager suffered serious burns after a party prank backfired in Kokatahi.

The Wild Foods Festival attracts bold appetites to a great town, writes Anna Leask.

A teenager is shrugging off the title of hero after he saved the life of an elderly whitebaiter who fell into a coma and slipped into the river last week.

Strange lights seen hovering over Hokitika this week are likely to have been a natural and common phenomenon, not extraterrestrial activity. A number of people witnessed the "dancing" sky lights on Tuesday night.