PESCARA
DEL TRONTO, Italy—Rita Caiella is staying put here, even after a
powerful earthquake destroyed her house and much of the town she has
called home for four decades.
The
69-year-old refused offers of hospitality from friends in other towns,
preferring to sleep in a tent city erected by civil- protection
officials near Pescara del Tronto, which was flattened when the
6.2-magnitude earthquake struck early Wednesday.
Ms.
Caiella knew all of the 11 local townspeople who have been confirmed
dead in the town of about 100 residents. Yet, she was determined to stay
close by.
“In the little villages, we
feel like family,” she said, weeping as she sat on a sidewalk curb and
fretted about how and when her neighbors would be buried given that the
town’s cemetery is now inaccessible. “Pescara is completely destroyed.…[
But] we have a lot of solidarity here.”
As search-and-rescue teams continue to dig through rubble left by the earthquake that
struck central Italy, killing at least 250 people, stories are emerging of harrowing escape and tragic loss.
Yet
many people living in the tiny, tightknit towns at the epicenter of the
disaster are determined to stay close to their shattered communities.
“We
see in people’s faces their will to rebuild their houses, to stay here
and to live here in the future,” said Luigi Dellegrazie, an official
from Italy’s national police corps involved in the searchandrescue
efforts in nearby Arquata del Tronto, another severely damaged town.
On
Thursday evening, the Italian government approved the first funds—€50
million ($56.3 million)—to help victims of the quake, whose epicenter
was around Norcia, a town about 105 miles northeast of Rome, and which
demolished other small towns high in the Appenines, including Amatrice
and Accumoli. With hundreds hospitalized and many still missing,
officials fear the death toll is bound to rise further.
Canine
units and emergency personnel armed with sensors that detect heat and
movement searched on Thursday for signs of life under the rubble of
collapsed walls and ceilings in the destroyed mountain towns.
Stories
of survivors gave search-and-rescue teams hope. In Pescara del Tronto,
firefighters had been digging with bare hands for hours on Wednesday
when they heard a girl cry out from the rubble.
It
was the younger of two sisters who had been reported missing inside
what was left of their house. Rescue crews had located the approximate
location of the girls’ bedroom and calculated how the shocks may have
shifted their location. A fallen beam had shielded the girl from rock
and concrete, allowing her to breathe and survive more than 12 hours
buried under the debris.
As the
dust-covered rescue workers pulled her out, applause erupted. It didn’t
last long. Soon, they found the lifeless body of the older sister, who
had been sleeping next to her younger sibling.
“I
hope she remembers only a little about it,” Angelo Moroni, a
firefighter who helped with the rescue, said of the younger girl in an
interview with Italian media. “Actually, if she doesn’t remember
anything it’s even better.”
The task is
growing grimmer as the hours pass. “We pulled out of rubble about 40
people alive and almost the same amount of dead bodies,” said Walter
Milan, spokesman for the Alpine Rescue Unit, which was among the first
to arrive before dawn Wednesday in Amatrice.
Rescuers
extracted one 8month-old boy from the rubble alive, but he later died
in the hospital. The rest of his family also perished, Mr. Milan said.
Some
emerged alive by pure luck. Amatrice resident Alessandra Mattioli, 33,
survived, along with her two young daughters and her husband, because
the roof of their home was built of wood, rather than stone. As a
result, it didn’t crumble, she says.
Dozens
of aftershocks continued into Thursday, unnerving residents and
hampering efforts to clear rubble and secure especially hard-hit areas.
After
the initial shock wore off, recriminations began to fly over the
failure in much of Italy to prepare for earthquakes, despite their
frequency here—a fresh challenge to the Renzi government in its handling
of the aftermath.
Images of the destroyed towns sparked sharp criticisms of local and national officials responsible for building regulations.
“Once
again, an earthquake has struck an area that is well known as
vulnerable to tremors,” Enzo Boschi, an expert in seismology at the
University of Bologna and former head of Italy’s National Institute of
Geophysics and Volcanology, wrote in a front-page editorial in Rome
daily Il Messaggero. “And once again, we are witness to grief and
devastation from a quake that would be considered by international
standards of medium intensity.”
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