The death toll from a devastating quake in central Italy rose sharply to nearly 250 people early on Thursday after rescue teams worked through the night to try to find survivors under the rubble of flattened towns. The tremors reduced three towns to rubble and sparked urgent search efforts.
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There have been at least 460 aftershocks since the initial quake hit the region, according to Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
Italy’s civil protection unit confirmed 73 fatalities in and around the villages of Amatrice, Accumoli and Arquata del Tronto.
“Many cases have shown in the past that even after two days, people can be rescued alive”, said Luigi D’Angelo from Italy’s Civil Protection Department.
Aerial photographs showed whole areas of Amatrice, previous year voted one of Italy’s most lovely historic towns, flattened by the 6.2 magnitude quake.
Rescuers work at a collapsed house following a quake in Amatrice, central Italy, August 24, 2016.
Hovik Abrahamyan, Armenian prime minister has sent his condolences to his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi over the powerful natural disaster that rocked central Italy on Wednesday causing hundreds of deaths and destruction.
A powerful quake shook central Italy on Wednesday, leaving at least 240 people dead and a trail of destruction across several mountain villages packed with holidaymakers.
The central Apennine region, a mountainous area of central Italy, has seen several significant temblors in the past, according to the USGS.
The rescuers, which include foreign crews, are also working through aftershocks – even one as powerful as magnitude 5.5.
Italian rescue workers are expecting fewer casualties than initially feared at the site of a hotel that was badly damaged in Wednesday’s quake.
Inhabitants of the four worst-hit small towns rise by as much as tenfold in the summer, and many of those killed or missing were visitors.
As thousands of rescuers continue attempts to locate survivors the death toll in the Italian quake has grown to at least 247.
Local officials believed over 30 people were staying at the hotel when the quake hit.
Rescue workers used helicopters to pluck survivors to safety in more isolated villages cut off by landslides and rubble.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 6.2-magnitude tremor struck at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers (six miles) southeast of Norcia – a town in Perugia, central Italy and occurred as a result of shallow normal faulting on a northwest-southeast oriented fault line in the Central Apennines.
In neighboring Accumoli a family of four, including two boys aged 8 months and 9 years, were buried when their house collapsed.
“There’s no sound from them, we only heard their cats”.
But spokesman Josh Earnest said due to Italy’s experience in responding to major quakes “it is not clear to me at this point that any of those offers have been taken up”.
“By some miracle, we are all alive”, the 67-year-old woman said, as her grandson slept in a small playground where rescue workers set up tents. The Ansa news agency reported that her mother, Martina Turco, who survived the 2009 quake, which struck just a few miles south of Wednesday’s epicentre, is being treated in hospital after being pulled from the rubble.
“Today is a day for tears, tomorrow we can talk of reconstruction”, he told reporters late on Wednesday.
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Sergio Perozzi, the mayor of the heavily affected city of Amatrice, said three-quarters of the town had been destroyed and no buildings were safe for shelter. Italy’s natural disaster institute INGV registered it at 6.0 and put the epicentre further south, closer to Accumoli and Amatrice.
