The death toll from a powerful earthquake in central Italy rose to 247 on August 25, 2016 amid fears many more corpses would be found in the rubble of devastated mountain villages. Rescuers sifted through collapsed masonry in the search for survivors, but their grim mission was clouded by uncertainty about exactly how many people had been staying in communities closest to the epicentre of the quake of August 24.
/ AFP PHOTO / FILIPPO MONTEFORTE
AMATRICE, Italy (AFP) – by Ella IDE with Angus MACKINNON in Rome
The death toll from a powerful earthquake in central Italy rose to 250 on Thursday as rescuers continued a grim search for corpses and powerful aftershocks rocked the devastated area.
The bulk of the confirmed deaths — 193 at the latest count — were in the small town of Amatrice, where Rita Rosine, 63, wept as she mourned her 75-year-old sister, who was buried under the ruins of her house.
“The situation is worse than in war. It’s awful, awful… they say it will take two days to dig her out because they have to shore up the surrounding buildings,” she told AFP.
“She didn’t deserve to die like that, she was so good.”
As hopes of finding any more survivors in the rubble faded, questions mounted as to why there had been so many deaths in a sparsely-populated area so soon after a 2009 earthquake in the nearby city of L’Aquila left 300 people dead.
That disaster, just 50 kilometres (30 miles) south, underscored the region’s vulnerability to seismic events — but preparations for a fresh quake have been exposed as limited at best.
Giuseppe Saieva, the chief public prosecutor for most of the area affected, said he would be opening an investigation into whether anyone could be held responsible for the disaster.
In Amatrice, a 4.3 magnitude aftershock shook the already badly damaged village on Thursday, fueling fears of fresh collapses which could hamper the rescue operation.
No new survivors
Amatrice normally has a population of around 2,500 but it was packed with visitors when the quake struck as people slept in the early hours of Wednesday.
A total of 215 people have been rescued from the rubble since Wednesday morning. But there have been no reports of survivors being found since Wednesday evening, when eight-year-old Giorgia was rescued 16 hours after being trapped, having been located by a labrador called Leo.
Her parents also survived but her 10-year-old sister did not make it. “I hope Giorgia will be able to forget what she went through,” Angelo Moroni, the head of the team that saved her, told La Repubblica.
The last survivor in L’Aquila was found 72 hours after the quake.
The Red Cross began shipping in food and water supplies for homeless residents.
Among those who came to pick up emergency provisions were Maria Atrimala, 48, and her 15-year-old daughter.
“We escaped by pure luck, the stairs of the house held and we ran, blindly in the dark and dust,” she said with tears rolling down her face.
“When we got out we could hear the cries of people still trapped and we helped those we could.
“We were in L’Aquila when the earthquake struck there, and now this. We have friends, relatives that didn’t make it. What the future holds I don’t know.”
‘What happens tomorrow?’
Hundreds of people spent the night sleeping in their cars or in hastily-assembled tents, the aftershocks adding to their discomfort.
Mario, a father of two small boys, said he was still in shock. “We slept in the car last night, though with the quakes it was hard to sleep at all,” he told AFP between sips of Coke.
“We’ve booked a tent for tonight. But then tomorrow, the next day?”
The extensive damage to lightly-used properties has raised the spectre of some of the smaller hamlets in the region becoming ghost towns.
“If we don’t get help, l’Arquata is finished,” said Aleandro Petrucci, the mayor of Arquata del Tronto, which accounted for 57 of the confirmed deaths to date.
Petrucci said it was impossible to say exactly how many people were in the 13 tiny communities that make up l’Arquata when the disaster struck.
In Pescara del Tronto, which was virtually razed by the quake, there are only four permanently resident families but there could have been up to 300 people there on Wednesday.
Measuring 6.0-6.2 magnitude, the quake’s epicentre was near Amatrice and its shallow depth of four kilometres (2.5 miles) exacerbated its impact.
It occurred without warning but in an area with a long history of killer quakes.
The Civil Protection agency which is coordinating the rescue effort said that in addition to the dead, 365 people had suffered injuries serious enough to be hospitalised. Several of them are in a critical state.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi vowed lessons from L’Aquila, which still bears the scars of 2009, would be applied. “The objective is to rebuild and start again,” he said.
‘Nothing ever done’
After L’Aquila, the Civil Protection agency made almost one billion euros
available for upgrading buildings in seismically-vulnerable areas.
But the take-up of grants has been low — because of form-filling attached, critics say.
“Here in the middle of a seismic zone, nothing has ever been done,” said Dario Nanni of the Italian Council of Architects.
“It does not cost that much more when renovating a building to make it comply with earthquake standards. But less than 20 percent of buildings do.”
Nanni said the quake’s impact had been increased by the widespread use of cement rather than wood beams. “These indestructible beams hit walls like a hammer and that is what made so many (houses) collapse.