Gus Patterson

Seventeen seconds. That is all it took for a man to smash a glass door at Oamaru’s Johnson Gluyas Tractors and steal three chainsaws at 2.45am on Tuesday.

Seventeen seconds. That is all it took for a man to smash a glass door at Oamaru’s Johnson Gluyas Tractors and steal three chainsaws at 2.45am on Tuesday morning.

Fifty years ago last week, the North Otago Farmers Co-operative department store went up in flames. The events of November 15, 1969 live on the the memory of thousands of Oamaru residents.

The number of arrest related to meth in Oamaru rose rapidly in the past year, but social service agencies and a former addict say the statistics still don't reflect just how widespread the issue has become in North Otago.

It will not just be pilots training at Oamaru Airport next year. The National Trade Academy (NTA) has announced plans to establish a dairy farm school at the airport, next to the NTA-affiliated New Zealand Airline Academy.

House prices in one Otago district have risen at almost double the rate of national growth.