Up to 30 people were feared to have died on Thursday after an Italian mountain hotel was engulfed by a powerful avalanche in the earthquake-ravaged centre of the country.However ten survivors were rescued by the firefighters
Italy’s Civil Protection agency confirmed the Hotel Rigopiano had been engulfed by a two-metre high wall of snow and that emergency services were struggling to get ambulances and diggers to the site. The agency said there had been around 30 guests and staff at the small ski hotel on the eastern lower slopes of the Gran Sasso mountain when the first of four powerful tremors rattled the region on Wednesday morning.
Local media said specialist mountain police who had reached the hotel on skis or by helicopter had begun extracting bodies. They were quoted as saying there were no signs of life inside the building, which was moved by some 10 metres by the force of the snow.
“There are many dead,” one of the commanding officers, Antonio Crocetta, was quoted as saying. The rescuers at the hotel were reported to have a snow mobile capable of transporting up to eight people. Ambulances were blocked by two metres of snow some nine kilometres (5.5 miles) away, according to the civil protection agency.A total of 10 survivors were found on Friday in the ruins of an avalanche-hit hotel in central Italy, the national spokesman for the fire service said, clarifying earlier confused tallies.
The spokesman, Luca Cari, said two people, a mother and her son, had been pulled out and taken to hospital while the remaining eight were still under the rubble but had been located by rescuers.Italian rescuers began pulling survivors from the ruins of a mountain hotel, two days after it was buried under a devastating avalanche.
Amidst relief that anyone at all had survived, there was confusion over the exact numbers located and extracted amid conflicting updates from different branches of the emergency services.A group of six people were found in an air pocket but only two of them, a mother and her young son, had been extracted by mid-afternoon, contrary to earlier briefings from rescuers.
Roberto Carminucci, one of the coordinators of the rescue operation, said contact had been made with another group, reported by Italian media to count five survivors.
“We are in contact and we hope to find survivors but we don’t know how many voices we are hearing or the state (of health) of those trapped so we cannot give any firm numbers yet,” he said. By late afternoon any survivors would have spent a full two days under the snow-covered rubble of the Hotel Rigopiano, a three-storey spa hotel on the eastern lower slopes of Monte Gran Sasso, the highest peak in central Italy.
Marco Bini, one of the officers who reached the first group of six survivors, said the rescue team had been alerted to their possible location when they detected smoke.
He said six people had been found together in an air pocket, including the mother and child, who were later shown emerging from a vertical tunnel in the snow.
“They were all in reasonable health, if very cold. The fire will have been using up the oxygen so we were lucky to find them.
“Their faces said it all, it was like they had been reborn.” A video released by firefighters showed the boy, thought to be seven, emerging into the air to cheers from firemen who mussed his hair.
Bini said the rescue had raised hopes others would be found in similar air pockets.
“The snow will have prevented anyone inside from getting too cold, it isolates like an igloo,” he said.
More than 25 people, including several children, were thought to have been in the hotel when it was hit by a massive wall of snow.
Revised estimates on Friday suggested the total could have been as high as 34. Two bodies were recovered when rescuers first reached the site.
Most of the guests were waiting to leave when the avalanche struck late Wednesday afternoon.
The had decided to leave after earthquakes in the region earlier in the day but the heavy snow blocked roads and delayed their transport.
Scores of mountain police, firefighters and other emergency personnel were deployed at the hotel.
Progress was agonisingly slow, with rescuers wary of triggering further movements in the snow piled up on top of the masonry.
Antonio Di Marco, president of the province of Pescara, which includes the mountain village of Farindola, close to where the hotel is located, said two people had been found alive.
“We don’t know yet how many people are unaccounted for or dead,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “What is certain is that the building took a direct hit from the avalanche, to the point that it was moved by 10 metres.”Farindola mayor Ilario Lacchetta said on his Facebook page that the dimensions of the avalanche were huge. “It took the whole hotel with it.” he said.
It was not clear if the two confirmed survivors had been at the hotel or had been out skiing when the avalanche occurred. One of them was helicoptered to a hospital in Pescara suffering from hypothermia but was not in a life-threatening condition. The region was hit by four seismic shocks measuring above five magnitude in the space of four hours on Wednesday, when at least one person was confirmed to have died.
The hotel is located around 90 kilometres (55 miles) from the epicentre of the quakes at Montereale, a small village south of Amatrice, the town devasted in an August earthquake in which nearly 300 people died.
Avalanche warnings were issued across the region which is dominated by Gran Sasso, a majestic 2,912 metres (9,554 feet) peak. The area has numerous small ski resorts popular with day-trippers from Rome and urban centres on Italy’s east coast.
One person was confirmed dead Wednesday after a body was found under the debris of a building in Castel Castagna, a small town to the north of Farindola. The quake affected an area that straddles the regions of Lazio, Marche and Abruzzo which is home to many remote mountain hamlets.
Although many residents had been evacuated after last year’s quakes, there were fears for families who had decided to stay in their homes and are now cut off. Some 130,000 homes were without electricity overnight as a result of quake-damage to pylons and other infrastructure.
Tags:
mishap