ACCUMOLI, Italy-Rescue teams were working through the night to try to find survivors under the rubble that remained of central Italian towns flattened by an quake that hit in the early hours of Wednesday, killing at least 159 people.
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Numerous victims were children, the health minister said, and there were warnings the toll could rise further.
“Unfortunately, 90 percent we pull out are dead, but some make it, that’s why we are here”, said Christian Bianchetti, a volunteer from Rieti who was working in devastated Amatrice. Guests filled its top Hotel Roma, famed for its amatriciana, where five bodies were pulled from the rubble before the operation was suspended when conditions became too unsafe late Wednesday.
Accumoli’s mayor, Stefano Petrucci, said some 2,500 people were left homeless in the local community of 17 hamlets. There are people under the rubble. Nearly all the houses there had collapsed, the BBC reported citing local officials as saying.
The hardest-hit places have proved to most difficult to access – they’re smaller and older, and numerous roads to get in were affected by the quake.
Sergio Pirozzi, mayor of Amatrice, said: “The town isn’t here any more”.
The death toll is now at 159 but is nearly certain to rise across the severely damaged regions of Lazio and Marche where local populations had swelled for the summer holidays.
Amatrice, known for its traditional all’amatriciana pasta sauce, had been gearing up to hold a festival celebrating the pork jowl, chili and pecorino recipe this weekend, with many visitors expected.
Rescuers work in the night at a collapsed house following an natural disaster in Pescara del Tronto, central Italy, August 24, 2016.
Rescue workers are still trying to dig through the rubble to rescue any survivors.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) confirmed the quake’s location and its magnitude.
Italian news reports Thursday said prosecutors investigating the quake were looking in particular into the collapse of Amatrice’s “Romolo Capranica” school – restored in 2012 using funds set aside after the last major quake struck central Italy in 2009.
The aftershock caused one building to partially collapse, sending up plumes of smoke and panic in Amatrice. Tent cities have begun to spring up around towns hit the hardest as trucks clear away rubble and rescue operations continue.
Scores of buildings were reduced to dusty piles of masonry in communities close to the epicentre of the quake, which had a magnitude of between 6.0 and 6.2.
One Spaniard, five Romanians, and a number of other foreigners, some of them care-givers for the elderly, were believed to be among the dead, officials said.
Norcia, which is about 170 kilometers (105 miles) northwest of Rome, was the epicenter of Wednesday morning’s 6.2 natural disaster that leveled the central Italian towns of Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, and killed at least 159 people.
It measured 6.0 according to Italian monitors, who put the depth at only four kilometres. “We are living this enormous tragedy”, said the Rev. Savino D’Amelio, an Amatrice parish priest.
“They say they took him to Rome, but we can’t find him”.
The towns, situated amid remote, mountainous terrain, are particularly popular in the summer with tourists seeking a scenic getaway from the heat of the city.
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In Pescara del Tronto, which was virtually razed by the quake, there only four permanently resident families but there could have been up to 300 people there on Wednesday.
