Help! We’re dying
Final texts from the 35 victims buried alive in hotel avalanche
TERRIFIED tourists whose ski hotel was engulfed by an enormous avalanche sent desperate text messages pleading for help.
There were fears 35 people – including seven children – had died at the four-star Hotel Rigopiano after 22 guests, seven staff members and several of their friends remained unaccounted for last night.
One text message sent from inside read: ‘Help, help – we are dying of the cold.’
The hotel in the central Italian region of Abruzzo was smashed by a wall of snow in the early hours of yesterday, shifting the three-storey building some 30ft.
Messages sent to staff from outside urged them to stay calm as 50 rescuers worked through the night.
Emergency services had to trek some 10km through 15ft of fresh snow to reach the resort near the town of Farindola.
They were greeted by an eerie silence at the 43-room, €160-a-night hotel in the Gran Sasso national park. Two people were rescued in the immediate aftermath of the avalanche, which is thought to have been triggered by four earthquakes. But according to a senior fire brigade source, a number of sniffer dogs had not detected any further signs of life.
Survivor Fabio Salzetta sent a text message saying he had escaped but that others were still trapped inside.
‘Some walls were knocked down,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I’m outside with a maintenance worker but you can’t see anything of the hotel – there’s only a wall of snow in front of me.’
Four bodies had been removed from the hotel by last night but it was feared there would be many more fatalities as the search continued. Video shot by rescue teams showed huge piles of filthy snow, ice and debris piled up inside corridors, stairwells and an indoor pool area. Aerial footage captured by helicopter crews
‘Wall of snow in front of me’
showed rescue workers on top of the building digging down through the snow to gain entry.
Giampaolo Parete survived because he went outside to get something from his car. But the 38-year-old’s wife and two children were still inside the hotel.
Rescue efforts were hampered by heavy snowfall which made it difficult to clear roads for ambulances and other emergency vehicles. Snowstorms in recent days had knocked out power and phone lines.
Walter Milan of Alpine Rescue said: ‘There is hope of finding people alive because these avalanches hit a building creating large pockets of air. We are working as if it was the first minute.
‘The main part of the hotel is completely deformed… Before it struck the hotel the avalanche flattened a wood. It travelled 300 metres picking up stones wood and boulders. A single cubic metre of snow weighs a ton.’
There was some criticism of emergency crews’ response.
But Fabrizio Curcio, of Italy’s civil protection authority, said it was having to confront the aftermath of both heavy snowfall and earthquakes – ‘two exceptional events’.