For some, quake rattles deeper fears
ACCUMOLI, ITALY » In this 12th-century town, as many as 70 percent of the homes were vacant in the off-season. There were fewer people on the streets. Numerous teenagers had left for good.
And that was before the earthquake.
As the search continued in the hard debris and as hopes dimmed that rescuers would find more survivors, cities and towns hard hit by central Italy’s devastating temblor began to process the full extent of the disaster.
Churches fell. Piazzas were ruined. Neighborhoods were leveled. The body count was at least 250 and set to grow.
But in many hard-hit central Italian towns already fighting a long battle against depopulation, a deeper anxiety began to spread.
Would the people ever come back?
Aftershocks — some strong enough to send already-damaged structures tumbling down — continued to belt the region Thursday. But for many, that was not what had them spooked the most. In some cases, these were towns already on the edge — places where sons and daughters had so little economic opportunity that many simply left. In quake-battered Accumoli, for instance, youth unemployment was already 30 percent in a town where 80 percent of the population was over 65.
In the aftermath of such destruction, some locals feared towns like this one might take years, maybe decades, to bounce back from the weight of Wednesday’s 6.2-magnitude earthquake.
In the temporary tent city set up for Accumoli’s newly homeless, Lucia Di Gianvito, a 57-year-old house cleaner, said she had had no word from the elderly woman who once employed her.
“She is probably dead,” Di Gianvito said. “Everything is going to be over now. No jobs. No shops left. It’s over.”
A woman nearby chimed in, saying that surely the town would rebuild. Di Gianvito just laughed. “The situation wasn’t good even before,” she said, adding that only one of her two adult sons had managed to find work. “There were no jobs. The young people are leaving. Should we leave, too? Maybe. But where will we go? There is no hope.”
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Thursday pledged a series of measures to aid and rebuild hard-hit towns, including tax relief and a 50 million euro ($56.4 million) package that he suggested was just a start.
“We have a moral commitment to the women and men of those communities,” Renzi said. “The reconstruction of those towns is a priority of the government and country.”
But as often happens in Italy after major quakes, the recriminations were already flying. Italy is the most earthquake-prone nation in Western Europe — as well as a nation stocked with ancient buildings and archaeological treasures whose care scholars see as paramount to preserving human history.
Yet vast numbers of older structures do not conform to anti-earthquake building codes adopted in the 1980s — and even many new buildings do no comply, experts say. Alessandro Amati, a seismologist at Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, estimated that 70 to 80 percent of buildings in Italy are not earthquake proof. In Wednesday’s quake, 293 cultural heritage assets in Italy were damaged — including several that totally collapsed.
When reinforcements are done here, they can be shoddy, and it is not unusual for criminal charges to be brought against architects and construction companies when allegedly safe buildings fail during quakes.
On Thursday, the Italian press reported that prosecutors were investigating how and why a school restored four years ago using government anti-earthquake funds managed to collapse.