Hundreds of aftershocks have rocked devastated areas of central Italy, hampering search efforts following the quake. The magnitude 6 quake struck at 3:36 a.m. (0136 GMT) and was felt across a broad swath of cen. There have been more than 460 aftershocks.
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The civil protection department has officially revised the death toll down to 241 from a previous 247 given earlier.
More than 300 people have been treated in hospital and dozens are believed to be trapped under rubble.
By Wednesday evening, hundreds of rescue workers arrived with sniffer dogs and huge cranes to lift the piles of rubble off of potential survivors.
In hard-hit Pescara del Tronto, firefighter Franco Mantovan said early on Thursday that crews knew of three residents still under the rubble, but in a hard-to-reach area.
The news follows a statement from Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson saying extra staff had been sent to the region to support Britons affected by the “terrible” quake.
The death toll appeared likely to rival or surpass that from the last major quake to strike Italy, which killed more than 300 people in the central city of L’Aquila in 2009.
Rescuers working with emergency lighting in the darkness saved a ten-year-old girl, pulling her out of the rubble alive, where she had lain for 17 hours in the hamlet of Pescara del Tronto.
Some people on Facebook were independently offering up their homes for free, while an Italian report said that 75 refugees living in Calabria had made a donation to the relief effort. As many as 70 tourists were staying at the hotel when the quake struck.
Rescue crews aided by sniffer dogs dug through crumbled homes Thursday looking for natural disaster survivors as Italy again anguished over how to secure its ancient towns and modern cities from the country’s highly seismic terrain.
Firefighters work in the night at a collapsed house following an natural disaster in Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016.
“We knew it was an quake”, she said.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit towns and villages in the mountainous heart of the country at a depth of 10 km about 11 km from Amatrice, a town of 2,000 people north of Italy’s Lazio region.
“It’s not easy for them”, said civil protection volunteer Tiziano De Carolis, who was helping to care for the homeless in Amatrice.
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The news agency ANSA reported that police arrested a 45-year-old man from Naples who tried to break into an abandoned home.
