PENNE, ITALY // Rescuers on Friday found six people alive in an Italian mountain hotel that was engulfed by an avalanche two days earlier, raising hopes that more survivors could be found.
Helicopters were taking five of the survivors, including a young girl and a woman thought to be her mother, to hospital in Pescara for treatment for hypothermia, officials said.
They were pulled out after more than 40 hours 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.
Two bodies have been recovered since the rescuers reached the hotel in the early hours of Thursday.
Footage from rescuers’ helmet cameras showed some of the hotel rooms were almost intact.
Federica Chiavaroli, a junior minister at the justice ministry, confirmed the finding of survivors.
“Six people have been found alive and they are being pulled out,” she said in the nearby town of Penne, where the rescue effort was being coordinated and some relatives were awaiting news of missing loved ones.
Updated estimates on Friday suggested as many 34 people were in the four-star hotel when it was hit by the avalanche – 20 to 22 guests, seven or eight staff members and an unknown number of visitors.
Most of the guests are thought to have been in or around the hotel’s entrance when the avalanche struck on Wednesday afternoon.
They had been waiting for transport to take them home after earthquakes in the region earlier in the day.
Scores of mountain police, firefighters and other emergency personnel have been working round-the-clock in a delicate and desperate hunt for signs of life. Rescuers are wary of triggering further movements in the snow piled up on top of the masonry that could endanger anyone still clinging to life under the rubble.
Lorenzo Gagliardi was one of the first mountain police officers to reach the hotel, trekking for more than eight kilometres through two metres of snow and arriving at about 4am on Thursday.
Two men who had been outside the hotel were found alive in their car but two other people located under the ruins could not be saved.
“There was practically nothing of the building left, just a little white hill,” he said.
“The first thing we heard was the hum of a generator that had turned itself on,” he said.
“Then we saw this car. It was in an open space 50 metres from the hotel and the engine was running. It was the only one not swept away by the avalanche.
“Inside there were two men, Giampiero Parete and Fabio Salzetta, still alive thanks to the car’s heating.”
Mr Parete, a 38-year-old chef, told the rescuers that his wife, son and daughter had been in the hotel.
“We were ready to leave at 2 pm. We were in the foyer with our bags, we’d paid the bill and were waiting for a snow plough to clear the road,” he said later after treatment for hypothermia.
“They told us it would be there at 3pm but for unexplained reasons that was put back to 7pm.
“My wife told me she had a headache so I went to the car to get some pills for her, Mr Parete said.
“As soon as I got out I felt this wind and then this deafening noise of trees cracking, trunks cascading down the hillside.
“Then the hotel collapsed under this enormous wave of snow and half the mountain. My car was the only thing that escaped, by a few centimetres.”
The avalanche followed four earthquakes of more than magnitude 5 in the space of four hours earlier on Wednesday.
The national civil protection agency confirmed two more deaths as a result of the quake, taking the total to five, including the two at the hotel.
* Agence France-Presse