Rescue continues as anguish mounts
70 percent of country’s buildings are not built to anti-seismic standards
Rescue crews raced against time on Thursday looking for survivors from the earthquake that leveled three towns in central Italy, but the death toll rose to nearly 250 and Italy once again anguished over trying to secure its medieval communities built on seismic lands.
Dawn broke over the rolling hills of central Lazio and Le Marche regions after a night of uninterrupted search efforts. Aided by sniffer dogs and audio equipment, firefighters and rescue crews using their bare hands pulled chunks of cement, rock and metal apart from mounds of rubble where homes once stood searching for signs of life.
One area of focus was the Hotel Roma in Amatrice, famous for the Amatriciana bacon and tomato pasta sauce that brings food lovers to this medieval hilltop town each August for its food festival.
Amatrice’s mayor had initially said 70 guests were in the crumbled hotel ahead of this weekend’s festival, but rescue workers later halved that estimate after the owner said most guests managed to escape.
Worst affected by the quake were the tiny towns of Amatrice and Accumoli near Rieti, 100 kilometers northeast of Rome, and Pescara del Tronto, 25 km further east.
Unapplied codes
As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began once again as Italy confronted the effects of having the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe, some of its most picturesque medieval villages, and anti-seismic building codes that aren’t applied to old build- ings and often aren’t respected when new ones are built.
“In a country where in the past 40 years there have been at least eight devastating earthquakes, ... the only lesson we have learned is to save lives after the fact,” columnist Sergio Rizzo wrote in Thursday’s Corriere della Sera. “We are far behind in the other lessons.”
Experts estimate that 70 percent of Italy’s buildings aren’t built to anti-seismic standards. After every major quake, proposals are made to improve, but they often languish in Italy’s thick bureaucracy, funding shortages and the huge scope of trying to secure thousands of ancient towns and newer structures built before codes were passed or after the codes were in effect but in violation of them.
In recent quakes, some of these more modern buildings have been the deadliest: 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 26 children — the town’s entire first-grade class. In some cases, the anti-seismic building standards have been part of the problem.
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 hard-hit Pescara del Tronto, firefighter Franco Mantovan said early on Thursday that crews knew of three residents still under the rubble, but in a hard-toreach area.
In the evening, 17 hours after the quake struck, firefighters pulled a 10-year-old girl alive from a crumbled home.
“You can hear something under here. Quiet, quiet,” one rescue worker said, before soon urging her on: “Come on, Giulia, come on, Giulia.”
Cheers broke out when she was pulled out.
But there were wails when bodies emerged. “Unfortunately, 90 percent we pull out are dead, but some make it, that’s why we are here,” said Christian Bianchetti, a volunteer. Deadliest quakes since 2000
A magnitude-6.2 earthquake shook central Italy early on Wednesday, followed hours later by a magnitude-6.8 temblor in Myanmar. Here is a list of some of the world’s deadliest earthquakes since 2000:
April 16, 2016: A magnitude-7.8 earthquake on Ecuador’s central coast kills more than 660 people.
April 25, 2015: A magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Nepal kills more than 8,000 people.
Aug 3, 2014: More than 700 people die in a magnitude-6.2 quake in Ludian, Yunnan province, China.
March 11, 2011: A magnitude-9.0 quake off the northeast coast of Japan triggers a tsunami, killing more than 20,000 people.
Jan 12, 2010: A magnitude-7.0 quake hits Haiti, killing up to 316,000 people according to government estimates.
Sept 30, 2009: More than 1,100 people die when a magnitude-7.5 quake hits southern Sumatra, Indonesia.
April 6, 2009: A magnitude-6.3 quake kills more than 300 people in L’Aquila, Italy.
May 12, 2008: A magnitude-8.0 quake strikes China’s Sichuan province, resulting in over 87,500 deaths.
May 26, 2006: More than 5,700 people die when a magnitude-6.3 quake hits the island of Java, Indonesia.
Oct 8, 2005: A magnitude-7.6 earthquake kills more than 80,000 people in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Dec 26, 2004: A magnitude 9.1-quake in Indonesia triggers a tsunami, killing 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
Dec 26, 2003: A magnitude-6.6 earthquake hits Iran, resulting in 50,000 deaths.