‘HELP, we are DYING of COLD’
AT LEAST 30 DEAD AS AVALANCHE BURIES HOTEL IN CENTRAL ITALY
Giampiero Parete stepped outside the Italian hotel for just a minute, to fetch some medicine for his wife from their car.
Within seconds, the Hotel Rigopiano, with his wife and two children inside, had been obliterated. An avalanche, a voracious 300- metre snow slide, had roared down the mountainside, uprooting trees in its path and burying most of the resort.
“I saved myself because I’d gone to pick something up from the car,” said Parete, a 38- year- old chef who was vacationing at the four- star spa and resort. “The avalanche came and I was buried by snow but I managed to get out. The car was not buried, so I stayed there and waited for rescue operators.”
It took hours for responders on skis to reach the remote hotel, located off a hairpin- path alpine road in the Gran Sasso mountain range in earthquake-stricken central Italy.
Plaintive text messages were sent to emergency numbers by those buried inside, according to the staterun ANSA news agency. “Help, we’re dying of cold,” one couple wrote rescuers.
But rescuers described only silence Thursday as they arrived and struggled to move the tightly packed snow — littered with rocks and tree limbs — that covered half the hotel’s toppled walls. There were no signs of life from the estimated 30 people trapped inside.
Immediately after the avalanche hit, Parete had called his employer, Quintino Marcella, and begged him to mobilize rescue crews.
“He said the hotel was submerged and to call rescue crews,” Marcella said, adding that he phoned police and the local prefect’s office, but no one believed him. “The prefect’s office said it wasn’t true, because everything was OK at the hotel.”
Marcella said he insisted, and called other emergency numbers until someone finally took him seriously and mobilized a rescue at 8 p.m., more than two hours later.
When rescuers on skis arrived at the hotel in the early morning hours of Thursday, they found just two people alive: Parete and Fabio Salzetta, identified by Italian media as a hotel maintenance worker.
“There are so many dead,” Antonio Crocetta of the local alpine rescue workers told ANSA. “The avalanche was huge.”
Days of heavy snowfall had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many central Italian towns and hamlets, and four powerful earthquakes struck the region on Wednesday.
It wasn’t immediately clear if any of the quakes triggered the avalanche. But firefighters said the sheer violence of the snow slide was overwhelming.
“There are mattresses that are hundreds of metres away from where the building was,” firefighters’ spokesman Luca Cari told ANSA.
The hotel in the Abruzzo region is about 45 kilometres from the coastal city of Pescara, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres. The area, which has been buried under as much as three metres of snowfall for days, is located in the broad swath of central Italy that was jolted by Wednesday’s quakes, one of which had a 5.7 magnitude.
Walter Milan, spokesman for the National Alpine rescue corps, said rescue teams tried to reach the site in a snowplow but were blocked by uprooted trees and rocks on the road.
Crews donned cross- country skis for the final seven-kilometre, two- hour stretch to reach the hotel. Other rescuers were dropped by helicopter after daybreak Thursday.
Video shot by rescue teams entering the still- standing parts of the hotel showed huge piles of filthy snow and debris piled up inside the corridors, stairwells and the indoor pool area. There was no sound except for the steps of the cameramen.
Aerial video shot by helicopter crews showed rescue workers on top of the snow- covered mound, frantically digging to try to get in.
A frosty mist, which had settled over the area, slowly began to lift.
“The mist is easing now,” said Antonio Marasco, an official with Italy’s road department. “And when the mist dissipates, the ugliness appears.”
By Thursday afternoon two bodies had been removed.
Premier Paolo Gentiloni, arriving at the regional civil protection headquarters at midday Thursday, sought to deflect criticism of the rescue work and urged authorities to redouble efforts to reach people still isolated by the quakes and snow across the quake zone.
“I ask everyone if possible to multiply their efforts,” he said. “I ask politicians to show sobriety respecting the difficulty of the situation and the commitment of civil and military crews who are responding.”
The buried hotel was just one of several rescues underway: Police video showed a grey- haired man being led to safety by rescuers through a path dug through deep snow elsewhere in the region.
Snow continued to fall Thursday with reports of people being isolated in many places. Daiana Nguyen, a resident of a town in the province of Teramo, told SKY TG24 that three metres of snow had fallen and that people were “completely isolated.”
“They talk about sending in the army: Thirty to 40 men came with shovels. We need heavy machinery!” she said.
The timing of the avalanche remained unclear, but the hotel posted a notice on its Facebook page that its phones were down early in the morning, around the time of the first of Wednesday’s quakes.
Gianluca Valensise, a seismologist at Italy’s national vulcanology centre, said it wasn’t clear if the quakes triggered the avalanche, since so much snow had accumulated in recent days.
“At the most it was a trigger, but certainly not the reason,” he said. “The avalanche certainly would have come down sooner or later, but the distance from the epicentre is quite substantial.”
Parete was being treated for hypothermia at a hospital in Pescara.