The quake struck towns and villages in the mountainous heart of the country, which was making the rescue operation more hard, said spokeswoman Immacolata Postiglione.
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The quake struck at 3:36 a.m. local time with an epicenter 47 miles southeast of Perugia at a depth of 6 miles (10 kilometers) Wednesday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor was felt from the Lazio region into Umbria and Le Marche on the Adriatic coast.
Rescuers work following Wednesday’s natural disaster that rocked Amatrice and several other towns in central Italy.
” ‘The whole ceiling fell but did not hit me, ‘ marveled resident Maria Gianni”. ‘I just managed to put a pillow on my head and I wasn’t hit luckily, just slightly injured my leg’.
She said that others from another part of the convent apparently didn’t make it: Three other nuns and four elderly women.
Amatrice is a hilltop beauty spot considered home of amatriciana, one of Italy’s favourite pasta sauces. “I don’t know what we’ll do”.
As the August sun turned into a nighttime chill, residents, civil protection workers and even priests dug with shovels, bulldozers and their bare hands to reach survivors. There was relief as a woman was pulled out alive from one building, followed by a dog.
“We need chain saws, shears to cut iron bars, and jacks to remove beams: everything, we need everything”, one civil protection worker Andrea Gentili told the AP.
Italy’s national blood drive association appealed for donations to Rieti’s hospital.
“I don’t know what to say”.
“We came out to the piazza, and it looked like Dante’s Inferno”, said Agostino Severo, a visiting resident of Rome. “We are only hoping there will be the least number of victims possible and that we all have the courage to move on”.
Residents of Rome were woken by the tremors, which rattled furniture, swayed lights and set off auto alarms in most of central Italy.
The quake which struck Italy in the early hours of Wednesday has devastated the region as the death toll continues to climb.
The quake struck in the early hours of the morning when most people were asleep, razing homes and buckling roads in a cluster of towns and villages some 140 km (85 miles) east of Rome. “I’m told this was short [for an earthquake], it was 20 seconds, but they felt very, very long, those 20 seconds”.
The ANSA news agency says two bodies have been pulled from the rubble of quake-hit Amatrice in central Italy after a strong quake levelled buildings as residents slept. “Two parents and two children”, the mayor, Stefano Petrucci, told RAI.
Premier Matteo Renzi, visiting the quake-affected zone Wednesday, promised to rebuild “and guarantee a reconstruction that will allow residents to live in these communities, to relaunch these handsome towns that have a wonderful past that will never end”.
More than 30 aftershocks have been reported since the initial quake, seven of which were greater than 4 magnitude.
“We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive”, Cari said, noting that in the 2009 quake in nearby L’Aquila a survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.
The most deadly temblor since the start of the 20th century came in 1908, when an quake followed by a tsunami killed an estimated 80,000 people in the southern regions of Reggio Calabria and Sicily.
Although the extent of damage and injuries was not immediately clear, the quake could be devastating.
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This corrects the locator of Norcia to northeast of Rome, not northwest.
