Shoddy, price-cutting renovations, in breach of local building regulations, could be partly to blame for the high death toll from this week’s devastating quake in central Italy, according to a prosecutor investigating the disaster.
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It’s one of several efforts that have sprung up to help the towns rebuild.
Italian President Sergio Mattarella visited Amatrice on Saturday, thanking rescue workers who have been grinding non-stop for days.
A spokesman for firefighters says that rescue workers have found six bodies over the past two days from the rubble of Amatrice, the hardest hit of three towns struck by the recent quake in Italy. They recovered three and by late Sunday were still working to retrieve others that were hard to reach.
The death toll is still rising, as searchers recovered three more bodies overnight from the rubble in the hilltop town.
Before Saturday’s mass funeral, the president visited Amatrice, which bore the brunt of destruction with 230 fatalities and a town turned to rubble and dust.
Authorities said 387 people were still in hospital, with one patient dying of his injuries during the day. It is there that the death toll has been rising.
Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said 293 culturally important sites in the area affected, many of them churches, had either collapsed or been seriously damaged. Investigations will focus on a number of structures, including an elementary school in Amatrice that crumbled when the quake hit Wednesday.
With schoolchildren still on their summer holidays, the school was not in use. Many were shocked that it didn’t withstand the 6.2 magnitude quake.
An outcry over the shoddy, corrupt building practices which led to so many buildings in the university city being inadequately prepared for a quake led to the national Civil Protection agency making nearly €1 billion (S$1.5 billion) available for upgrading buildings in quake-vulnerable areas.
Italy yesterday observed a day of national mourning as many victims were buried.
Massimo Caico, the firefighter who pulled the girls out, told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper that the position of the older girl’s body apparently created a pocket of air that allowed Giorgia to survive. “Post-quake reconstruction is always very appetising for criminal gangs and their business partners”.
Roberti noted he wasn’t involved in the local prosecutors’ probes into last week’s quake.
A woman touches a coffin of one of the victims of Wednesday’s natural disaster inside a gymnasium in Ascoli Piceno.
Meanwhile museums across Italy will donate proceeds from Sunday’s ticket sales to help the rebuilding effort and football teams will hold a minute’s silence before their weekend matches out of respect for the victims.
The investigators now want to recover building contracts, architects’ plans and other documents from the rubble of town halls in places such as Amatrice and Accumoli, which was also destroyed by the 6.0 magnitude natural disaster.
Amatrice bore the brunt of earthquake’s destruction, with at least 229 fatalities and its medieval heart almost obliterated.
Mourners in Italy prayed, hugged, wept and even applauded as 35 coffins carrying natural disaster victims passed by at a state funeral in the town of Ascoli Piceno. There will be no repeat of a failed attempt to replace the old communities with new towns elsewhere, which happened after L’Aquila.
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Multiple ambulances were also bringing the dead to an airport hangar in the provincial capital of Rieti, where four big white refrigerated trucks created a makeshift morgue to which relatives came in a steady stream Friday.
