L’AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) – Rescuers searched through the night for survivors of an earthquake that killed more than 150 people in central Italy early yesterday and left thousands of homeless huddled in tent camps and rough shelters.
Firemen and emergency workers pulled more than 100 people from the rubble but rain and freezing night-time temperatures into today complicated the search for survivors in the medieval mountain city of L’Aquila and the devastated surrounding villages.
The quake struck shortly after 3.30 am (0130 GMT) yesterday, catching residents in their sleep and flattening houses, ancient churches and other buildings in 26 cities and towns.
Aftershocks rattled the area, some 100 km east (60 miles) of Rome in the rugged Abruzzo region, well into the night as thousands of people sheltered in their cars or in tent camps.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who declared a national emergency and visited the disaster zone, said at least 150 people had been killed and more than 1,500 injured. The civil protection agency put the number of homeless at up to 50,000.
“It is a serious disaster. Now we must rebuild and that will require huge sums of money,” Berlusconi said, pledging to seek hundreds of million of euros from an EU disaster fund.
Rescue workers using powerful floodlights and bulldozers searched for survivors through the night in L’Aquila, freeing some people trapped for more than 20 hours. A fireman recounted how he pulled a boy alive from the mangled remains of his house.
“All we could see was his head sticking from the rubble, his entire body was buried. We kept digging, picking piece by piece of debris and we finally managed to get him out — when we did the fatigue was great but so was our joy,” he said.
Police patrolled houses ripped open by the quake and arrested several people for looting.
Thousands of tents were put up in parks and on football pitches to shelter the homeless for the night and hotels on the Adriatic coast were requisitioned.
“It’s been such a hard and long day. Now that we are sitting here in our car it’s all beginning to sink in,” said L’Aquila resident Piera Colucci as she prepared to sleep in her vehicle.
Berlusconi, whose government is already struggling to find funds to cope with an economic crisis, said his cabinet would provide 30 million euros ($40.60 million) for immediate assistance and vowed to build a new town in L’Aquila in the next two years. He ordered 1,000 troops to the area today.
“Tonight don’t go back to your houses, it could be dangerous,” Berlusconi told residents on state television. Shaken survivors described the quake striking like a bomb in the night and the anguish of not knowing the fate of loved ones.
“I only remember this huge rumble and then someone dragged me out, but I don’t know what happened to my wife and three-year-old son,” said 35-year-old Stefano Esposito.
Most of the dead were in L’Aquila, a city of 68,000, where streets were strewn with rubble and old buildings crumbled like straw houses. Some nearby towns were all but destroyed.
In the flattened village of Onna, at least 38 people died and more than 40 were missing, according to local civil protection chief Franco Albanesi. Tearful relatives gathered while wooden coffins were placed on communal ground.
As messages of condolences poured in from across the world, Italian politicians put aside rivalries and united in mourning.
But there was still room for controversy. Weeks before, an Italian scientist predicted a major quake around L’Aquila based on the radon gas found in seismically active areas, but he was reported to police for “spreading alarm” and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.
“For weeks they told us to stay calm, that we could live in our houses, that there was no problem. Now we see what the problem was,” one female resident of L’Aquila told state TV.
