Italy earthquake death toll rises to 250 as rescuers race to find survivors

'We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive,' mayor Luca Cari said, noting that in the 2009 earthquake in nearby L’Aquila a survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.

A drone photo shows the damages following an earthquake in Pescara del Tronto, central Italy on August 25, 2016. Stefano De Nicolo/Reuters

AMATRICE, ITALY // With the death toll at 250, rescue crews raced against time on Thursday looking for survivors from the earthquake that levelled three towns in central Italy and the authorities were left pondering once again how to secure its communities built on seismic fault lines.

For the second uninterrupted day, the emergency services worked on, aided by sniffer dogs and audio equipment but sometimes using their bare hands to pull chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble in the hope of finding of life.

“We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive,” Sais firefighters’ spokesman Luca Mr Cari said, recalling that in the 2009 earthquake in nearby L’Aquila a survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.

It was initially feared that 70 guests staying at the Hotel Roma in Amatrice were lost but that number was later halved after the owner said most guests had managed to escape.

Most of the dead were in Amatrice and Accumoli and nearby hamlets, all of them small communities located near Rieti, 100 kilometres north-east of Rome, and in Pescara del Tronto, a further 25 kilometres east. The earthquake was followed by 460 aftershocks, including one of magnitude 4.3 which brought down another building n Amatrice.

Around 1,200 now homeless spent the night in tent cities set up by the civil protection agency. In Amatrice, some 50 elderly people and children were accommodated in a sports hall.

“It’s not easy for them,” said civil protection volunteer Tiziano De Carolis, helping to care for about 350 homeless in Amatrice. “They have lost everything, the work of an entire life, like those who have a business, a shop, a pharmacy, a grocery store and from one day to another they discovered everything they had was destroyed.”

Italian firefighters began escorting survivors back to their homes, but only so they could collect some belongings. Many homes in the three hardest-hit central Italian towns, even if they remain standing, have been declared uninhabitable.

Among the survivors was Violeta Bratu. In 1977, when she was eight, she survived a strong earthquake in her native Romania that killed 1,500. In the second earthquake she has experienced, she helped evacuate the 97-year-old man she looks after, complete with his hospital-style bed, because their home is unsafe. Antonio Putini had slept through the earthquake. His son and Ms Bratu took him to safety in a sports centre on the edge of Amatrice, where he lay attached to oxygen, under the tartan blanket Ms Bratu had managed to salvage, alone with her dog.

Sister Mariana, 32, was one of three nuns who survived, along with one elderly woman, when half of their convent in Amatrice collapsed, killing three other nuns and four aged women. When the convent falls began to shake, she and her fellow survivors took each other’s hands.

“They saved each other, they took their hands even while it was falling apart, and they ran, and they survived,” said the Albanian-born nun, who suffered a head wound and dust inhalation. Her fellow nuns are now caring for her in the town of Ascoli Piceno, east of Amatrice.

Father Krzysztof Kozlowski, a Polish priest, was trapped under debris in Accumoli for several hours before he was pulled out. His next-door neighbours — a family with six-year-old child and eight-month-old baby — all died and he considers his survival a miracle.

“Even as I was waiting for help, for someone to bring me out of the apartment, I could feel the tremors. I was afraid they could destroy whatever was left of my house,” he said. “This is a great miracle for me. I was born anew.”

Ewa Szawaja was woken by the tremors but managed to escape with her family via a balcony, after grabbing warm clothes.

“I will remember till the end of my life this noise, the evil murmur of moving walls,” she said. “The house in front had collapsed and we stepped from the balcony onto the rubble. The bedroom of our neighbours did not exist anymore. From everywhere in the darkness people were calling ‘Help! Help!’ but we could not help them. Our neighbours, my son’s friends and their mother died under the rubble. Their father was saved because he was on a night shift.”

As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began once again as Italy confronted the effects of having the highest risk of earthquakes in Western Europe, some of its most picturesque medieval villages, and anti-seismic building codes that are not applied to old buildings and are often not applied when building new ones.

"In a country where in the past 40 years there have been at least eight devastating earthquakes ... the only lesson we have learnt is to save lives after the fact," wrote columnist Sergio Rizzo in Corriere della Sera. "We are far behind in the other lessons."

Experts estimate that 70 per cent of Italy’s buildings are not built to anti-seismic standards. After every major earthquake, improvements are suggested but they often languish in the many layers of Italian bureaucracy, funding shortages and the scope of trying to secure thousands of towns built before such regulations existed as well as newer structures built in violation of them.

In recent earthquakes, some of these more modern buildings have proved to be the most dangerous. They include the university dormitory that collapsed in the 2009 L’Aquila quake, killing 11 students; the elementary school that crumbled in San Giuliano di Puglia in 2002, killing the town’s entire first-grade class of 26 children. In some cases, the anti-earthquake measures are the problem. When earthquakes strike, weak walls cannot support roofs made of reinforced concrete.

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, visiting the disaster zone, promised to rebuild “and guarantee a reconstruction that will allow residents to live in these communities, to relaunch these beautiful towns that have a wonderful past that will never end”.

While the government is already looking ahead to reconstruction, rescue workers on the ground still had days and weeks of work ahead of them. In Pescara del Tronto, fireman Franco Mantovan said on Thursday that crews knew of three residents still under the rubble, but in a hard-to-reach area. Seventeen hours after the earthquake, firefighters pulled a 10-year-old girl alive from under her demolished home as onlookers cheered.

Sadly, the child, named Giulia, is an exception. Volunteer Christian Bianchetti said, “Unfortunately, 90 per cent we pull out are dead, but some make it, that’s why we are here.”

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