Damaging winds and sea surges from ex-tropical Cyclone Pam are escalating as the storm batters the Chatham Islands today.

Chatham Islands Mayor Alfred Preece said a state of emergency was declared yesterday to ensure all residents were prepared.

Live updates of Cyclone Pam's impact in New Zealand and the aftermath in devastated Pacific Island nations.

Volunteer Service Abroad said it could still not account for four Kiwi volunteers in Vanuatu.

Dozens are feared dead on Vanuatu and up to 10,000 are homeless in the wake of Cyclone Pam.

Government ministers, foreign press and ambassadors including New Zealand's Mark Sinclair are sitting in a glitzy conference room in downtown Tokyo, looking at stunning photographs on powerpoint of a....

New Zealanders in Vanuatu have been drafted in to help at the capital's main hospital after it was ravaged by Cyclone Pam.

Tropical Cyclone Pam is slowly weakening as it approaches NZ, but will still be "a very powerful tropical cyclone" as it passes the country within a few hundred kilometres.

Rescue and recovery teams have entered the four remote Australian Northern Territory communities hit hardest by Cyclone Lam and are beginning to catalogue the damage.

Communities in coastal Queensland and New South Wales are bracing themselves for downpours of up to 500mm.

A woman cried "everything's gone" before collapsing as her family's home went up in flames yesterday.

Minutes after an inferno ripped across a tinder-dry paddock behind her Christchurch home, Julia Walker thought she was going to die.

A teenage farmhand became an accidental hero after keeping a potentially disastrous scrub fire at bay.

Vo Van Duong's bamboo and coconut leaf house looks much like others deep in Vietnam's Mekong Delta.

A state-of-the-art laboratory near Franz Josef Glacier is being packed up after an ambitious drilling operation came to a premature end before scientists could bore through the high-risk Alpine Fault.

At 7.58am on Boxing Day 2004 the ground shook and Jamaliah's world began to crumble.

It was the first time in 40 years Andrew Welch had not been home for Christmas, his brother Jeremy recalls.

"I had never seen in my life so much destruction and death on such a massive scale. I remember going to a place called Lambaro, just outside Banda Aceh...

It was Christmas Day and life seemed perfect for Petra Nemcova. The Czech model had already graced the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine...

Mike Bush was in Bangkok when the Boxing Day earthquake struck and even though he was 1250km from the epicentre, he felt it.

The US Pacific coast's most ferocious storm in years has moved south, bringing hurricane force winds and heavy downpours to southern California one day after claiming two lives in the Northwest.

A powerful typhoon destroyed homes and flooded low-lying coastal villages in the Philippines, forcing a million people to flee to safety and reportedly leaving at least three dead.

When Dr Noel Trustrum landed in the Indonesian province of Aceh in January 2005, the Kiwi scientist struggled to comprehend what he saw around him.

A year ago, Typhoon Haiyan created a series of storm surges that left several thousand people dead and around four million homeless.

Scores of walkers were still missing in the Himalayan mountains of Nepal yesterday, after a blizzard that is now known to have claimed the lives of more than 40 people.

The most powerful earthquake to strike California for 25 years has heightened fears that the state may soon face a "mega-quake" with a strength exceeding 7.5.