Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is helping coordinate rescue efforts with authorities, the Italian Council of Ministers said in a statement.
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The first of three major shocks hit at 3:36am local time, about one mile (two kilometers) outside of the small town of Accumoli, in a mountainous area about 100 miles (150 km) northeast of Rome.
The quake that occurred at 03:36 by the Italian time caused serious damage to a number of towns and villages, but did not seem to have hit heavily populated areas.
Some buildings in the area feature architecture dating to the 16th century, according to the website for the city of Amatrice.
Amatrice is known for its traditional all’amatriciana pasta sauce, and was gearing up to hold a festival celebrating the recipe this weekend, CNN reported. According to witnesses on the ground, whole towns and villages have been almost wiped out by the Italy natural disaster.
Making efforts even more hard were some 40 aftershocks that rocked the region into the early morning, some as strong as 5.1 magnitude, the Associated Press reports. ‘I just managed to put a pillow on my head and I wasn’t hit luckily, just slightly injured my leg’.
A woman, sitting in front of her destroyed home with a blanket over her shoulders and too distraught to give her name, said she did not know what happened to her loved ones. “We have already extracted several dead bodies but we do not know how many there are there below”. The worst damage was suffered by Pescara del Tronto, a hamlet near Arquata in the Marche region which civil protection workers described as having been virtually razed. The Rieti provincial chapter of Italian blood donation charity AVIS has put out a call for people to donate blood for the injured. Rescue crews were working to free people from the rubble. “We ran down the stairs but the door was blocked by stones so we had to climb out the window”, he said tearfully. And we have not seen a single soldier.
“There was another one about an hour later”.
The sun rises over collapsed buildings following the natural disaster in Amatrice.
The quake was initially reported as being magnitude 6.4.
The devastation harked back to the 2009 quake that killed more than 300 people in and around L’Aquila, about 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of the latest quake. The town sent emergency teams yesterday to help with the rescue.
“To hear the mayor of Amatrice say his village no longer exists and knowing that there are children among the victims, is very upsetting for me”, he said.
Hearing the mayor of Amatrice in central Italy say his town no longer exists and knowing there were children who died August 24 in the earthquakes that struck the region, Pope Francis turned his weekly general audience into a prayer service.
Dramatic photos from affected towns show residents digging their neighbours out by hand and entire piazzas reduced to rubble.
The emergency services released an aerial photograph showing whole areas of the town of Amatrice flattened, while debris filled the streets of nearby Accumoli.
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Rescue workers used helicopters to pluck trapped survivors to safety in more isolated villages cut off by landslides and rubble. “Try to breathe a little, you can do it”, he tells her.
