In the evening there, about 17 hours after the quake struck, firefighters pulled a 10-year-old girl out alive from the rubble of a home.
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Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said that his cabinet would meet on Thursday to decide measures to help affected communities.
“Everybody is outside and people are quite afraid to go inside their houses”, CNN’s Fred Pleitgen reported from the town of Accumoli.
Aerial video taken by drones showed swathes of Amatrice, a year ago voted one of Italy’s most lovely historic towns, completely flattened.
“When we learned that the hardest hit place was here, we came, we spoke to our bishop and he encouraged us to come here to comfort the families of the victims”, said the Rev. Marco as he walked through Pescara del Tronto. In others, there is only sky.
The 6.2 magnitude quake and its aftershocks demolished several small towns in a remote, mountainous region of Italy near Rome and Perugia.
The death toll in the natural disaster that hit central Italy on Wednesday has climbed to 247, with hundreds still unaccounted for or severely wounded, Italian authorities said Thursday morning.
Some of the survivors have described apocalyptic scenes “like Dante’s Inferno” after the quake, with buildings razed to the ground and dust and gas filling the air.
The death toll from the massive quake that struck central Italy on Wednesday continues to rise.
Italian firefighters are escorting quake survivors back to their homes – temporarily – to get some belongings left behind when they fled the shaking.
Italian Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin said numerous victims are children.
The hardest-hit places have proved to most difficult to access – they’re smaller and older, and numerous roads to get in were affected by the quake. In Amatrice, 50 elderly people and children spent the night inside a local sports facility. Most of the dead – 190 – were in Amatrice and Accumuli and their nearby hamlets.
Meanwhile, central Italy continues to tremble.
She said neighbors Sergio and Assunta and their 13-year-old grandson didn’t survive.
Though the full extent of the damage is unknown as of writing authorities estimate that more than 1,000 people in the region have been displaced by the natural disaster.
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In May 2012, a pair of earthquakes killed dozens of people in northern Italy, while in April 2009, a magnitude-6.3 quake hit in the Aquila region of central Italy, killing 295.
