But another official with the agency, reached by phone, called it a “temporary number” that may yet climb.
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“It was very shocking”, she said. Half the town is gone”, Pirozzi reportedly said, adding, “There are people under the rubble.
In footage captured by Italy’s State Forestry Corp, a rescue worker comforts an elderly woman left trapped in the rubble of her home. Several survivors, including a small girl, were plucked alive from heaps of debris.
Accumoli Mayor Stefano Petrucci told ANSA that all homes in the city are uninhabitable and that a tent city for the “entire population” would have to be set up.
The magnitude 6.1 quake struck at 3:36 a.m. and was felt across a broad swath of central Italy, including the capital Rome where residents felt a long swaying followed by aftershocks.
The house had been badly damaged, with what appeared to be structural cracks through the building.
Deadly earthquakes have struck Italy in recent years.
Tommaso della Longa, a spokesman for the Red Cross, said Amatrice had been “almost completely destroyed”.
Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, in the Apennine Mountains, are among the hardest-hit towns.
“Thank God there was no serious damage in our building”, he said.
“The town isn’t here anymore”, he said.
ANSA, the Italian news agency, is reporting that the death toll has risen to 63.
The emergency services released an aerial photograph showing whole areas of the town of Amatrice flattened, while debris filled the streets of nearby Accumoli.
Aftershocks threaten to further damage buildings in the affected area, which were a mix of vulnerable and earthquake-resistant housing stock. There are people under the rubble.
The latest reports by the Associated Press say at least 73 people were killed in the quake. ‘Everything is broken.’ Amatrice’s hospital was evacuated, and its 15 patients were moved out into the street.
“For the moment one death is confirmed but there are another four people under the rubble and they are not responding. Two parents and two children”, Petrucci reportedly said.
The quake occurred around 100 miles northeast of the capital city of Rome.
“I could feel the ground shake and my three dogs started to go a little insane, running around and barking”, Maurizio Serra, 56, told USA TODAY. “The oldest houses, those of 1700, are damaged. but those made in the ’70s are pulverized”.
“It’s a normal fault quake and it’s an expression of the east-west extensional tectonics where the Tyrrhenian Basin is being opened up”, Dutton said. Italy’s natural disaster institute INGV registered it at 6.0 and put the epicentre further south, closer to Accumoli and Amatrice.
“I was blown away by what I saw”.
The last major quake to hit Italy struck the central city of L’Aquila in 2009, killing more than 300 people.
The first quake was followed by at least 11 tremors in what the seismological center described as a “high aftershock rate”.
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The shaking was caused by movement in the Tyrrhenian Basin, a seismically active area beneath the Mediterranean Sea.
