25 Aug 2016
[Reprinted from the Stuff website]
An eight-year-old has been found alive among rubble as the desperate search for survivors of Italy's massive earthquake continues.
The 6.2 magnitude quake devastated a string of mountain towns in central Italy on Wednesday, trapping residents under fallen buildings, killing at least 120 people and leaving thousands homeless.
The quake struck in the early hours of the morning when most residents were asleep, razing homes and buckling roads in a cluster of communities some 140km east of Rome.
Survivors of the 6.2 magnitude quake in central Italy recount stories of trapped residents crying for help from under the rubble, as rescuers scrambled to save them. Mana Rabiee reports.
A family of four, including two boys, one aged nine, the other eight months, were buried when their house in Accumoli imploded. As rescue workers carried away the body of the infant, carefully covered by a small blanket, the children's grandmother blamed God: "He took them all at once," she wailed.
An 8-year-old girl was pulled alive from the rubble in Pescara del Tronto, one of the three towns most severely demolished by the earthquake.
After nightfall Wednesday, two women ran up the street yelling "She's alive!"
Chief firefighter Danilo Dionesei confirmed the girl was taken to a nearby hospital.
The devastation in Pescara del Tronto, central Italy.
Several New Zealanders in Italy reported being rocked awake by the initial quake, but there was no indication that any were affected or hurt in the disaster, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.
The New Zealand Embassy in Rome was in contact with Italian authorities, a spokesman said.
There were currently 475 New Zealanders registered on the Ministry's SafeTravel website as being in Italy.
The quake was powerful enough to be felt in Bologna to the north and Naples to the south, each more than 220km from the epicentre.
The army was mobilised to help with special heavy equipment and the treasury released €235 million (NZ$361 million) of emergency funds.
POPE SENDS FIREFIGHTERS
Pope Francis dispatched firefighters of the Vatican's tiny fire department to join rescue efforts following the quake.
The Vatican said six of its firefighters travelled to the town of Amatrice to help civil protection workers look for survivors still under the rubble and assist those already rescued.
The total force of the 108-acre city-state's fire department numbers 37.
Earlier on Wednesday, the pope cancelled a scheduled speech at his weekly general audience on religious teachings and instead prayed with the crowd for victims and survivors.
"Hearing the mayor of Amatrice say that the town no longer exists and learning that there are children among the victims, I am deeply saddened," he told tens of thousands of people gathered in St Peter's Square.
Rescue workers used helicopters to pluck trapped survivors to safety in the more isolated villages, which had been cut off by landslides and rubble.
Aerial photographs showed whole areas of Amatrice, voted last year as one of Italy's most beautiful historic towns, flattened by the 6.2 magnitude quake. Many of those killed or missing were visitors.
"It's all young people here, it's holiday season, the town festival was to have been held the day after tomorrow so lots of people came for that," said Amatrice resident Giancarlo, sitting in the road wearing just his underwear.
Helicopter footage captured the devastation Arquata del Tronto suffered following the deadly 6.2 magnitude earthquake and subsequent aftershocks on Wednesday.
"It's terrible, I'm 65-years-old and I have never experienced anything like this, small tremors, yes, but nothing this big. This is a catastrophe," he said.
The national Civil Protection Department gave the official death toll of 73 at about 12 hours after the pre-dawn quake struck, before Prime Minister Matteo Renzi updated the toll to 120 about 16 hours after the quake.
Scores more will still believed unaccounted for, with the presence of the summer holidaymakers making it difficult to tally.
DISAPPEARING INTO DUST
Patients at the badly damaged hospital in Amatrice were moved into the streets.
"Three quarters of the town is not there anymore," Amatrice mayor Sergio Pirozzi told state broadcaster RAI.
"The aim now is to save as many lives as possible. There are voices under the rubble, we have to save the people there."
Stefano Petrucci, mayor of nearby Accumoli, said some 2500 people were left homeless in the local community, made up of 17 hamlets.
Residents responding to wails muffled by tonnes of bricks and mortar sifted through the rubble with their bare hands before emergency services arrived with earth-moving equipment and sniffer dogs.
Wide cracks had appeared like open wounds on the buildings that were still standing.
The national Civil Protection Department said some survivors would be put up elsewhere in central Italy, while others would be housed in tents that were being dispatched to the area.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he would visit the disaster area later in the day: "No one will be left alone, no family, no community, no neighbourhood. We must get down to work ... to restore hope to this area which has been so badly hit," he said in a brief televised address.
Rescue workers continued their search for survivors of a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that reduced the town of Amatrice to rubble on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for the civil protection department, Immacolata Postiglione, said the dead were in Amatrice, Accumoli and other villages including Pescara del Tronto and Arquata del Tronto.
Most of the damage was in the Lazio and Marche regions. Neighbouring Umbria was also affected.
The US Geological Survey, which measured the quake at 6.2 magnitude, said it struck near the Umbrian city of Norcia, while Italy's earthquake institute INGV registered it at 6.0 and put the epicentre further south, closer to Accumoli and Amatrice.
INGV reported 150 aftershocks in the 12 hours following the initial quake, the strongest measuring 5.5.
The damage was made more severe because the epicentre was at a relatively shallow 4 km below the surface of the earth.
Residents of Rome were woken by the tremors, which rattled furniture, swayed lights and set off car alarms in most of central Italy.
"It was so strong. It seemed the bed was walking across the room by itself with us on it," Lina Mercantini of Ceselli, Umbria, about 75 km away from the hardest hit area, told Reuters.
Italy sits on two fault lines, making it one of the most seismically active countries in Europe.
The last major earthquake to hit the country struck the central city of L'Aquila in 2009, killing more than 300 people.
The most deadly since the start of the 20th century came in 1908, when an earthquake followed by a tsunami killed an estimated 80,000 people in the southern regions of Reggio Calabria and Sicily.