The discoveries came just a hope was fading for about 30 people missing after the alpine resort was swallowed by the huge snowslide late Wednesday. Rescuers had concentrated on areas where people could have been huddled in air pockets formed by partially collapsed walls.
The state-run news agency ANSA, citing rescue leaders, said contact was made with at least eight people, including two young girls. A mother and her daughter were among the first to be lifted from snow as deep as 15 feet in places, it said.
Helicopters have been sent to the site, located at 4,000 feet in the Gran Sasso mountains in the Abruzzo region. Up to this point, only three bodies had been recovered from the 4-star Hotel Rigopiano.
“We have been working since last night under extreme condition to look for survivors,” Matteo Gasparini, head of the alpine rescue service, told ANSA. “The dogs are often perceiving smells but we will have to dig for more than four or five meters before we reach the ground.”
Authorities are hoping that when the avalanche hit the hotel, the ceiling collapsed in such a way that some may have survived inside the unstable structure.
The digging is moving at a snail’s pace using shovels and hands because of the cold and remote conditions, rescuers told local media. The road to the hotel is still impassable to heavy vehicles.
It appears that many of the guests had packed their belongings and gathered in the hotel lobby and hallways when the earthquake struck Thursday evening, the hotel director said by phone on a live TV talk show hosted by Barbara D’Urso, a regular guest of the hotel.
Director Bruno Di Tommaso said that guests were worried about the earthquakes that had shaken the region that day and were preparing to leave, but the road was blocked by snow.
Di Tommaso had descended to the nearby city of Pescara to coordinate road clearing efforts and send snow vehicles to evacuate the guests – vehicles that apparently never arrived.
He estimated there were 11 staff members and 24 guests in the hotel that evening, but no one had anticipated an avalanche.
A manslaughter investigation has been opened into the incident over the possibility that the threat of an avalanche was not taken seriously enough, reported the Italian media.
Footage of the hotel interior showed walls of snow peppered with tree branches that had punched through the building and into the main rooms.
Quakes have been shaking the area since August, when 300 died. Meanwhile, the season’s unusually heavy snow fall has been more than the mountains could contain. The combination resulted in the lethal avalanche.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post · Stefano Petrelli, Paul Schemm, Brian Murphy
