Italy earthquake: Eight-year-old girl dies protecting her younger sister
Rescuers in desperate search for survivors as death toll nears 250
The death toll from a powerful earthquake in central Italy rose to 247 amid fears many more corpses would be found in the rubble of devastated mountain villages.
An eight-year-old girl sacrificed her own life by throwing herself on top of her younger sister as the rubble from Italy’s devastating earthquake encased them, according to a report by the Daily Mail. The two sisters were found buried together in the rubble of their holiday home in the village of Pescara del Tronto but only one of them survived, added the report.
The sisters had come to their grandmother Angela Cafini home for a vacation. Their distraught grandmother informed that her four-year-old grand daughter escaped with barely a scratch thanks to her older sister who lay on top of her to protect her as the house collapsed around them.
‘Giulia died saving her sister. She lay on top of her. That is the only reason she is alive. I am told she has no injuries and that is the only explanation for that,’ Ms Cafini was quoted saying by the Daily Mail.
A rescue team pulled a 10-year-old girl alive from the rubble of a house in town of Pescara del Tronto, 18 hours after it was flattened by a devastating earthquake in Italy's central Apennines, reports IANS.
The schoolgirl, named Giulia, was rescued late on Wednesday amid cheering but 90 percent of the earthquake victims are being pulled out dead from beneath the rubble, according to rescuers.
Meanwhile, 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 epicentre 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 quake.
Monica, a survivor from the tourist town of Amatrice, told of her numbed response when a 4.5magnitude aftershock rattled the area just after 5.00 am (0300 GMT).
"We are sleeping in the car and there were shocks all night. When the biggest one came, the car started moving and shaking.
"But what have we got to lose now? We have lost our house. So many friends and family are dead. We have lost everything, even our fear," she told 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.
"If we don't get help, l'Arquata is finished," said Aleandro Petrucci, the mayor of Arquata del Tronto, which accounted for 57 of the confirmed deaths to date.
Petrucci said it was impossible to say exactly how many people were in the 13 hamlets comprising his community when the disaster struck.
"Here in the winter, the village is practically uninhabited but the population doubles or triples when people come back to their family houses in the summer," he said. In Pescara del Tronto, which was virtually razed by the quake, there only four permanently resident families.
But Petrucci said there could have been up to 300 people there yesterday. Some may have fled back to Rome, the mayor said, appealing for them to get in touch. "Otherwise we could be trying to dig out ruins where there is no-one," he said.
Measuring 6.0-6.2 magnitude, the quake's epicentre was near the towns of Accumoli and Amatrice, occurring at the shallow depth of four kilometres (2.5 miles), according to monitors. But it was only the latest in a long string of killer quakes in the central Apennines, part of the mountainous "spine" that runs down Italy. Records dating back seven centuries attest to tens of thousands of deaths.
The Civil Protection agency which is coordinating the rescue effort said that in addition to the dead, 264 people had suffered injuries serious enough to be hospitalised. Several of them are in a critical state. Although firemen and volunteers on the ground were pessimistic about the chance of finding any more survivors, several of them recalled that the last survivor of a 2009 in nearby L'Aquila was pulled from the rubble some 72 hours after it struck.