At least eight foreigners were among the 250 people killed when a powerful natural disaster struck central Italy this week, officials said, as rescuers continued the grim search for corpses on Friday (Aug 25).
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Italian Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin said numerous victims are children.
The 6.2 magnitude quake and its aftershocks demolished several small towns in a remote, mountainous region of Italy near Rome and Perugia.
Survivors described apocalyptic scenes “like Dante’s Inferno” and the mayor of the hardest-hit town, Amatrice, said the “town isn’t here any more”.
Firefighters and rescue crews using sniffer dogs worked in teams around the hard-hit areas in central Italy, pulling chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble where homes once stood.
Rescuers working with emergency lighting in the darkness saved a 10-year-old girl, pulling her alive from the rubble where she had lain for some 17 hours in Pescara del Tronto.
Spain’s foreign minister said one Spanish national had been killed, with Spanish media saying it was a young woman who had lived in the village of Illica with her Italian husband, who survived.
“We knew it was an quake”, she told TVN24.
Among the victims of an quake in Italy was an 18-month-old girl whose mother survived the deadly natural disaster of 2009 in nearby L’Aquila and moved away from there after that bad experience.
“Half the village has disappeared”, said Amatrice mayor Sergio Pirozzi, surveying a town center that looked as if had been subjected to a bombing raid.
“The Apennine mountains in central Italy have the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe and earthquakes of this magnitude are common”, noted Richard Walters, a lecturer in Earth sciences at Durham University in Britain.
At least 38 people have been killed, according to Italy’s Civil Protection Department.
“The operation continued throughout the night and obviously there will be no let-up until it is absolutely clear that there is no possibility of finding any more people in the ruins”, said Immacolata Postiglione, the head of the Civil Protection agency’s emergency unit.
“It was pretty terrifying”, she said. The quake Wednesday struck an area close to the 2009 natural disaster.
“We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive”, Cari said, noting that in the 2009 quake in nearby L’Aquila, one survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.
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The civil protection agency gave the updated figure early Thursday, about 27 hours after the quake struck. The cost of the 2009 L’Aquila quake, comparable by magnitude and extent of the damage, has run into the billions of euros. In Arquata del Tronto, which includes Pescara del Tronto, at least 46 were killed.
