ACCUMOLI, Italy – After toiling through the night, an army of 5,000 rescue workers combed through mounds of hard rubble in a desperate search for new survivors Thursday following a devastating earthquake that may yet become Italy’s deadliest in decades.
A series of powerful aftershocks kept rocking the hard-hit zone Thursday, with one strong afternoon tremor sending a dust cloud over the already flattened town of Amatrice. The shocks complicated rescue efforts as the death toll from Wednesday’s quake rose to 247, according to the Civil Protection agency. An additional 270 people were being treated for injuries.
But many people remained missing, and were feared dead under the weight of tons of fallen brick and concrete in historic towns across central Italy. Resigned rescuers continued digging out a collapsed hotel in the leveled town of Amatrice. Officials worried that the ultimate death toll may yet surpass the roughly 300 people killed in the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. That would make Wednesday’s temblor Italy’s worst since a severe one in the south claimed thousands of lives in 1980.
“The number of confirmed dead has increased exponentially; we are above 190 in the city,” Amatrice Mayor Sergio Pirozzi told Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI. “We keep on digging.”
But he also suggested that hope was fading.
“You ask me if there is news on whether there are people who could still make it,” Pirozzi said. “Since last night, no.”
Here in Accumoli – a small 12th-century town of nearly 700 and one the hardest-hit in the region – survivors were crammed into impromptu tent cities. The encampment of light blue tents was only of many sprouting up on the outskirts of devastated, historic towns across the region to serve as emergency shelter for thousands of residents displaced by the quakes.
The string of aftershocks left homeless residents and rescuers on edge.
“Here it comes,” said one volunteer rescue worker, bracing herself as a tremor hit the city shortly after 1:30 p.m. on Thursday.
Inside the tent city, the initial shock was ebbing, and survivors began to focus on the challenges ahead. Towns such as Accumoli, 91 miles northeast of Rome, have already faced years of decline. Despite pledges to rebuild, residents feared that their lives would only get worse.
Lucia Di Gianvito, a 57-year-old house cleaner who lost her home in the quake, said she had no word from the elderly woman who employed her.
“She is probably dead,” Di Gianvito said.”Everything is going to be over now. No jobs. No shops left. It’s over.”
A woman nearby chimed in, saying the town would rebuild. But Di Gianvito laughed.
“The situation wasn’t good even before,” she said, adding that only one of her two adult sons had managed to find work. “There were no jobs. The young people are leaving. Should we leave, too? Maybe. But where will we go? There is no hope.”
The main earthquake, measured by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.2 magnitude and a shallow six miles below ground, struck at 3:36 a.m. on Wednesday and was centered about 100 miles northeast of Rome. The impacted zone stretched across the regions of Lazio, Umbria and the Marches. A string of strong aftershocks continued to hit the affected zone, and the damage was far-flung, with some of the worst devastation in Lazio. Ancient Italian villages and towns were turned into disaster zones, with fallen buildings and homes clogging narrow hillside streets.
The vacation month of August is when the area’s towns come alive with part-time residents and tourists – a fact that officials said could drive the death toll up.
During the main quake on Wednesday, buildings swayed from Rome to Venice. But large parts of Amatrice – a town of 2,700 known for supplying the chefs of popes and the recipe for one of Italy’s greatest pasta dishes – were left in ruins.
Pirozzi, Amatrice’s mayor, addressed concerns over the town’s collapsed Hotel Roma. Initially, officials feared that as many as 80 guests may have been sleeping there when the quake hit. But Pirozzi said the owners, hospitalized for their injuries, told officials that only 32 guests were at the hotel that night. Pirozzi said six bodies have been recovered so far.
“The rest either died or are injured,” he said.
But other officials told the Associated Press that many of the guests managed to escape. Carlo Cardinali, a local fire official taking part in the search efforts at the hotel, told the agency that only about 10 guests were still missing.
More than a day after the quake, rescuers – from first responders to legions of volunteers – raced to conduct searches as fears increased that the chances of finding survivors would dwindle with each passing hour. Even as they searched, Italy cheered as a 10-year old girl was pulled from the rubble alive 17 hours after the quake, offering a dramatic moment of hope.
Video images from the hard-hit town of Pescara del Tronto showed anxious rescuers hearing the girl and finding her moving foot before staging a frantic dig.
“Come on Giulia, come on Giulia,” one rescuer called out, reassuring the girl.
A round of applause broke out as they pulled her out from under a beam and piles of rocks.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, speaking from northern Lazio on Wednesday, looked beyond the rescue operation to the huge task of rebuilding. “The credibility and honor of us all will be in granting a true reconstruction that allows the residents to live and restart,” he said.
Yet Italian officials were coming under fire for failing to do more to reinforce the ancient cities and towns across the earthquake-prone country, and local officials feared it would take years to rebuild – possibly much longer.
Amatrice, the scene of some of the worst devastation, was to host the 50th annual Spaghetti Amatriciana Festival this weekend – a celebration of its famous tomato-and-pork-jowl pasta dish that was scheduled for the town square. That square is now a pile of rubble, and Amatrice is counting its dead.
The 15th-century main gate to the town – which resisted invasions and past earthquakes – crumbled.
Two churches, from the 14th and 15th centuries, collapsed.
“We were used to earthquakes, but now the town is no more,” Pirozzi said.
On the town’s dusty, devastated streets late Wednesday, the bell-tower clock was stuck at 3:36. Three women walked on restlessly, one of them in a panicked search for a family friend. All around, rescuers plucked away at rubble with heavy machinery, pickaxes and bare hands.
At one point, 10 men with a search dog pinpointed a possible survivor – or body – buried in the rubble. They labored feverishly in the debris of a ruined building.
There were moments of relief and joy – several survivors, including a small girl, were pulled alive from debris. But random scenes of tragedy also unfolded. One rescue worker ran across a street, for instance, telling another in resignation about the fate of a possible survivor. He simply said, “Marco, he’s dead.”
And there were heroics. “My brother, he risked his life to try to save his wife,” said a distraught visitor, Nunzia Onori, 59. “He ran back into the house to save her while it was collapsing. He tried so hard. But she did not make it. It makes you want to cry.”
Sister Mariana Lleshi, 35, was among the survivors at a convent and nursing home crushed by the quake. “I remember hearing something, a loud noise, and then hiding under my bed,” Lleshi said. “I was screaming, and I got out and started running when the ceiling started coming down.”
A young man who was staying overnight at the convent found her in the chaos and guided her to safety. “All I could see was destruction around me,” she said. “I had lost all hope to get out of this alive, but God sent me his messenger.”
Picture: Associated Press
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(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Stefano Pitrelli, Anthony Faiola
