After nightfall Wednesday, 20 hours after the quake first hit, two women ran up the street yelling “She’s alive!”
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“We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive”, Cari said, noting that in the 2009 natural disaster in nearby L’Aquila a survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.
He didn’t immediately give any further details about her condition.
“From here everyone survived”, said Sister Mariana, one of three nuns and an elderly woman who survived the quake that pancaked half of her Amatrice convent.
As rescue workers carried away the body of the infant, covered by a small blanket, the children’s grandmother blamed God and wailed: “He took them all at once”. Rescuers were working through the night to pull survivors from the rubble and “won t slow down”, Curcio told public broadcaster Rai.
Unfortunately, another rescue did not turn out as well.
Sergio Perozzi, the mayor of Amatrice, said, “Roads in and out of town are cut off”.
Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, visiting the devastated area, said numerous victims were children: The quake zone is a popular spot for Romans with second homes, and the population swells in August when most Italians take their summer holiday before school resumes.
According to honorary Vice-Consul of Italy Sebastiano Deiana, one family in Regina has ties to the quake-struck region, but said there are no reports of any injuries. The center of Amatrice was devastated, with entire palazzos razed to the ground. “I don’t know what we’ll do”.
“We came out to the piazza, and it looked like Dante’s Inferno”, said Agostino Severo, a Rome resident visiting Illica.
“The small settlement of about 20 houses is less than a mile away from the epicenter of a deadly 6.2-magnitude quake, which killed at least 247 people, according to Italian authorities”.
The devastation harked back to the 2009 quake that killed more than 300 people in and around L’Aquila, about 90km south of the latest quake.
The national Civil Protection Department said some survivors would be put up elsewhere in central Italy, while others would be housed in tents that were being dispatched to the area.
It was relatively shallow at 4 km (2.5 miles) below the earth’s surface. Generally, shallow earthquakes pack a bigger punch and tend to be more damaging than deeper quakes.
Emergency vehicles carrying heavy machinery were still winding their way through the hills of Rieti in central Italy as the sun set on the first full day of rescue operations following this morning’s deadly pre-dawn quake. “We are living this vast tragedy”, said a tearful Rev Savino D’Amelio, a parish priest in Amatrice.
“We are only hoping there will be the least number of victims possible and that we all have the courage to move on”, D’Amelio said.
Some of the worst damage was in Pescara del Tronto, a hamlet near Arquata in the Marche region where the bodies of the dead were laid out in a children’s park.
Residents were digging their neighbours out by hand before emergency crews arrived.
Photos taken from the air by regional firefighters showed the town essentially flattened.
“That frankly is a testament to the expertise of the Italians in responding to situations like this, but if our friends in Italy need our help, particularly in dealing with a situation like this, you can rest assured that we’re going to provide it”, he told reporters.
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The mayor said about 70 people had been staying in the Hotel Roma, a town landmark that has a restaurant which serves the famous pasta dish.
