Hopes fade of finding more survivors as quake toll keeps rising

PESCARA DEL TRONTO: Hopes of finding more survivors faded yesterday, three days after a powerful earthquake hit central Italy, with the death toll rising to 267 and the rescue operation in some of the stricken areas called off.

Sniffer dogs and emergency crews continued to scour piles of rubble in Amatrice, a picturesque town popular with tourists which was levelled by Wednesday’s quake and where 207 bodies have been retrieved so far.

But in nearby villages, such as Pescara del Tronto, rescuers pulled out after all the missing had been accounted for.

Italy plans to hold a state funeral for about 40 of the victims today in the nearby city of Ascoli Piceno.

A day of national mourning was announced, with flags due to fly at half mast around the country for the dead, who include a number of foreigners.

The civil protection department in Rome said nearly 400 people were being treated for injuries in hospitals, 40 of them in critical condition. An estimated 2 500 people were left homeless by the most deadly quake in Italy since 2009.

Survivors with nowhere else to go are sleeping in neat rows of blue tents set up by emergency services close to their flattened communities.

“It was quite a tough night because you have a significant change in temperature here. During the day, it is very, very hot and at night it is very, very cold,” said Anna Maria Ciuccarelli of Arquata del Tronto.

“There are still aftershocks preceded by booms and, for those of us who have just lived through an earthquake, it has a great effect, particularly psychologically,” she said.

More than 920 aftershocks have hit the area since the original 6.2 magnitude quake struck early on Wednesday.

“We have removed the last bodies that we knew about,” said Paolo Cortelli, a member of the Alpine Rescue national service who helped to recover about 30 bodies from Pescara del Tronto.

“We don’t know, and we might never know, if the number of missing that we knew about actually corresponds to the people who were actually under the rubble.”

The foreigners who died in the disaster included six Romanians, a Spanish woman, a Canadian and an Albanian. The British embassy in Rome declined to comment on reports that three Britons, including a 14-year-old boy, had died. – Reuters