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Professionals real estate agent Kris Rasmussen ran the auction dubbed Pennies for Benny on Thursday. A final count up of all the money raised in an auction for three Taranaki gas explosion victims has seen more than $8000 added to the total, which now reaches more than $29,000. The auction, named Pennies for Benny, was held on Thursday for Ben D’Ath, Leticia Nixon and Kerry Roach, after their New Plymouth home was destroyed in a fire caused by a gas explosion on December 29. Associates of D’Ath decided to rally around the trio, who lost everything in the blaze, and auctioned off more th...

The day a Taranaki man who was seriously burnt in a gas explosion was flown home from Waikato Hospital, more than $20,000 was raised for him and two others at an auction.

A Taranaki man who was seriously burnt in a gas explosion has woken to his community rallying around him.

SIMON O'CONNOR/STUFF Kerry Roach put a ladder up to the top balcony and got Ben D'Ath and Leticia Nixon out of their New Plymouth home after a gas explosion. A lit candle sparked a gas explosion that has left a 26-year-old New Plymouth man in an induced coma. But he wasn’t the only victim. Jane Matthews reports. "I just heard him scream,” Leticia Nixon, says. “The whole room just went up in flames.” Nixon and her partner, Ben D’Ath, were settling in for the night at their Devon St West flat, while their downstairs neighbour, Kerry Roach, was relaxing on his couch with his French b...