Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Thursday that a number of Britons had been “affected” by the natural disaster, which has left at least 250 people dead and levelled three small towns after it struck in the early hours of Wednesday.
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Rome – At least thirty seven people are dead Wednesday after a magnitude 6.2 natural disaster struck central Italy, according to local news reports. Rescue teams and volunteers have flocked to the site of the destruction to aid victims, but the death toll is expected to rise. Trucks full of rubble left the area every few minutes, including one in which a dusty doll could be seen lying on top of tonnes of debris.
“We saw unfortunately only bodies pulled out”, CNN correspondent Barbie Nadeau said from the village of Saletta, where 22 people were killed.
The Civil Protection agency which is coordinating the rescue effort said that in addition to the dead, 264 people had suffered injuries serious enough to be hospitalised.
Sergio Pirozzi, mayor of Amatrice, said: “The town isn’t here any more”.
The mayor said the bodies of 15-20 tourists were believed to be under the rubble of the town’s Hotel Roma, which he said had about 32 guests when it collapsed on Wednesday morning.
As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began once again as Italy confronted the effects of having the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe, some of its most picturesque medieval villages, and anti-seismic building codes that are not applied to old buildings and often are not respected when new ones are built.
Media reports say some 8,000 Romanians live in the area in central Italy where the quake struck early Wednesday.
It is Wednesday evening, about 17 hours after the quake struck, and firefighters hear a faint noise beneath the rubble of the quake-hit town of Pescara del Tronto.
Travel insurance comparison site Squaremouth has released advice for travellers affected by the recent magnitude-6.2 quake that hit central Italy on 24 August.
Much of the houses in the area – unreinforced brick or concrete frame buildings – were vulnerable to earthquakes, according to the US Geological Survey, and offered little resistance to the powerful temblor.
“On the other side it fell as well and did not hit me, but fell just next to me, very, very close to me, and luckily it didn’t hit me”.
Two young boys and their parents died in the nearby town of Accumoli when the church bell tower crashed through their roof.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi led an emergency Cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss reconstruction plans for affected areas.
It’s bad news for rescuers, who have been desperately combing through mountains of rubble for a second day, hoping to find more survivors.
Most of the damage was in the Lazio and Marche regions, with Lazio bearing the brunt of the damage and the biggest toll. Neighbouring Umbria was also affected. Those included the university dormitory that collapsed in the 2009 L’Aquila quake, killing 11 students, and the elementary school that crumbled in San Giuliano di Puglia in 2002, killing 27 children – the town’s entire first-grade class – while surrounding buildings survived unscathed. Two people were killed in Pescara del Tronto, a small town in the Ascoli Piceno province, and a family of four was killed in Accumoli La Repubblica reported.
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The quake was relatively shallow at 4 km (2.5 miles) below the earth’s surface.
