Fires

A six-year-old boy who died after a fire gutted his family home in Wanganui last night has been named.

An elderly man with restricted mobility is dead after a fatal house fire in the eastern Bay of Plenty yesterday.

• At 4 o'clock yesterday morning a fire occurred at South Dunedin, by which two shops and a dwelling were practically gutted.

The alarm was given from near the Kensington overbridge, and the fire proved to be in a two-storeyed wooden building in King Edward Street.

One person is dead following a house fire in a remote settlement in the eastern Bay of Plenty this afternoon.

A Balclutha woman awoke to find her hallway filling with smoke yesterday after a hair-drier left plugged in in a bedroom caught fire.

The owners of a Dunedin industrial building and business destroyed in a suspicious fire more than a year ago are offering a $10,000 reward for the arsonist.

Alexandra police investigating the series of deliberately-lit fires in the town have received a couple of names of possible suspects.

Three suspicious fires in a pine forest during the past week all had the potential for disaster, Alexandra's chief fire officer Russell Anderson said.

Investigators remain at the scene of a suspicious forest fire which forced the evacuation of about 40 people from their homes near Canvastown in Marlborough on Tuesday night.

A fire in Wenita's Mt Allan forestry block, northwest of Dunedin, is expected to be the most expensive of its kind in the country, the national rural fire authority says.