Rescuers face grim task as quake toll rises
The death toll from a powerful earthquake in central Italy increased to 241 on Thursday amid fears that many more corpses would be found in the rubble of devastated mountain villages.
Rescuers sifted through collapsed masonry in the search for survivors.
But their grim mission was clouded by uncertainty about exactly how many people had been staying in communities closest to the epicenter of Wednesday’s quake.
Hundreds of people spent the night sleeping in their cars, in hastily assembled tents or as guests of families in nearby areas less affected by the disaster.
One survivor from the tour- ist town of Amatrice told of her numbed response when a magnitude-4.5 aftershock rattled the area just after 5 am.
“We were sleeping in the car and there were shocks all night. When the biggest one came, the car started moving and shaking.
“We have lost our house. So many friends and family are dead. We have lost everything, even our fear,” she told the AGI news agency.
The damage to smaller, more remote hamlets has left their very existence in doubt in an area that has suffered decades of depopulation and already has numerous “ghost” villages.
Aleandro Petrucci, the mayor of Arquata del Tronto, which has accounted for 57 of the confirmed deaths to date, said, “If we don’t get help, Arquata is finished.”
Petrucci said it was impossible to say exactly how many people were in the 13 hamlets comprising his community when the quake struck.
The quake’s epicenter was near Amatrice and Accumoli, occurring at the shallow depth of 4 km, according to monitors. The magnitude has been reported at 6.0 to 6.2.