PUPPIES OFFER NEW HOPE AT AVALANCHE SITE
22 still missing five days after hotel disaster
• Emergency crews pulled three wiggling, white sheepdog puppies out Monday from under tonnes of snow and rubble at an avalan chestruck hotel, lifting spirits even as the search for 22 people still missing dragged on five days after the disaster.
One more body was located, raising the death toll to seven, and the first survivors of the deadly avalanche were released from the hospital.
Questions intensified, however, into whether authorities underestimated the risks facing the snowbound resort in the hours before the avalanche.
Five days after up to 60,000 tonnes of snow, rocks and uprooted trees plowed into the Hotel Rigopiano in central Italy, rescue crews were still digging by hand or with shovels and chainsaws in hopes of finding more survivors.
An excavator reached the site, northeast of Rome, to speed up the search.
The discovery of the three Abruzzo sheepdog puppies in the boiler room raised spirits, even as rescuers located a seventh body.
Jubilant emergency crews carried the pups out in their arms, with one firefighter burying his face in the fluffy white fur to give the dog a kiss.
The puppies were born last month to the hotel’s resident sheepdogs, Nuvola and Lupo, and were prominently featured on the hotel’s Facebook page. Their parents had f ound their own way out after the Wednesday afternoon avalanche.
“They just started barking very softly,” said Sonia Marini, a member of the Forestry Corps.
“In fact, it was hard to find them right away because they were hidden. Then we heard this very tiny bark and we saw them from a little hole the firefighters had opened in the wall. Then we expanded the hole and we pulled them out.”
Firefighter spokesman Luca Cari, however, stressed that the puppies were found in an isolated part of the hotel and didn’t necessarily signal any new hope for finding human survivors.
“We’re happy to have saved them, and these are i mportant moments in a dramatic situation,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s much correlation with finding other people.”
Emergency crews have been hoping that the 22 missing people may have found air pockets under the debris, and that the snow would insulate them from the frigid temperatures.
But more than two days have passed since anyone has been pulled out alive from the hotel, and rescue crews were still trying to recover one victim from the rubble.
Conditions at the site were deteriorating, with the heavy snow turning to ice.
So far nine people have been rescued from the Hotel Rigopiano.
The first survivors released Monday from a hospital in the nearby city of Pescara included Giorgia Galassi and her boyfriend, Vincenzo Forti.
“Thank you, thank you everyone!” Galassi said as she waved from the front door of her parents’ home in Giulianova, on the Adriatic coast.
Flanked by her parents, she said she felt fine.
Hotel guests Giampiero Parete, his wife and two children were also home. It was Parete who had first sounded the alarm after he by chance left the hotel to go to his car moments before the avalanche hit.
Still hospitalized were one adult and two youngsters, Samuel Di Michelangelo and Edoardo Di Carlo. Officials have confirmed that Edoardo’s parents were killed, while Samuel’s are still unaccounted for.
“Edoardo has an adult brother, so the brother will be given custody of him,” Pescara hospital doctor Rossano Di Luzio told reporters.
“Samuel has his close relatives, grandparents at the moment, but we hope we can give him back to his parents.”
Firefighter spokesman Luca Cari said emergency crews were working with an “operational hypothesis” that people might still be alive, but he stressed “we are fighting against time.”
The investigation intensified, meanwhile, into whether local government officials underestimated the threat facing the hotel, which was covered with two metres of snow, had no phone service and dwindling gas supplies when a series of earthquakes rocked central Italy on the morning of Jan. 18.
I DON’T THINK THERE’S MUCH CORRELATION WITH FINDING OTHER PEOPLE.