“The town isn’t here anymore”, Amatrice mayor Sergio Pirozzi said.
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The 6.2 magnitude temblor, followed by numerous aftershocks, devastated towns and villages and killed more than at least 38 people in a mountainous region about 85 miles northeast of Rome.
“It was one of the most handsome towns of Italy and now there’s nothing left”, she said, too distraught to give her name. Italy’s national blood drive association appealed for donations to Rieti’s hospital.
The most deadly since the start of the 20th century came in 1908, when an quake followed by a tsunami killed an estimated 80,000 people in the southern regions of Reggio Calabria and Sicily.
ANSA news agency reported 10 dead there without citing a source, but there was no confirmation. “We came out to the piazza, and it looked like Dante’s Inferno”, said Agostino Severo, a Rome resident visiting Illica.
As rescue workers carried away the body of the infant, carefully covered by a small blanket, the children’s grandmother blamed God: “He took them all at once”, she wailed.
The main road into and out of the town was covered in debris, making it hard for search and rescue teams to gain access to some damaged areas.
“I don’t know what to say”. He estimated dozens of residents were buried under collapsed buildings and that heavy equipment was needed to clear streets clogged with debris.
“Now that daylight has come, we see that the situation is even more terrible than we feared with buildings collapsed, people trapped under the rubble and no sound of life”, Pertucci, Accumoli mayor, told RAI-TV. “We are only hoping there will be the least number of victims possible and that we all have the courage to move on”.
Elsewhere in the town, a church is seen with its roof collapsed and surrounded by rubble, while in the town of Pescara del Tronto houses have collapsed causing new openings to roads.
Aerial footage showed whole areas of Amatrice, voted past year as one of Italy’s most lovely historic towns, flattened by the quake.
He said the town of just 700 residents swells to 2,000 in the summer months thanks to tourism, but that he feared for its future after the natural disaster.
The mayor of Arquata del Tronto, near Pescara, said that, in addition to the one confirmed death, four people were trapped under rubble and not responding to residents trying to reach them.
The State Department is also asking US citizens in Burma to contact relatives to let them know you’re OK. The Rev. Fabio Gammarota told ANSA another three were killed in a separate collapse.
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Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he would visit the disaster area later in the day: “No one will be left alone, no family, no community, no neighbourhood”. At the Vatican, Pope Francis cancelled part of his general audience to pray for the victims.
