Italian boy credited with helping save brother after quake
MILAN (AP) — An Italian family of five was “reborn” after all three children buried in the rubble of their home by a 4.0-magnitude quake were pulled to safety Tuesday in a painstaking 16-hour rescue operation on the popular Mediterranean resort island of Ischia.
The Toscano family’s happy ending brought cheers from the dozens of firefighters who worked through the night to extricate the two boys and their infant brother, trapped alone for hours after their father was rescued and their pregnant mother managed to free herself from their collapsed apartment in the hard-hit town of Casamicciola.
“I don’t know how to define it if not a miracle,” the boys’ grandmother, Erasma De Simone, said after the family was reunited at a hospital. “We were all dead, and we are reborn.”
Though relatively minor in magnitude, the quake Monday night killed two people, injured another 39 and displaced some 2,600 people in Casamicciola and the neighboring town of Lacco Ameno on the northern end of the island.
The damage in Ischia focused attention on two recurring themes in quake-prone Italy: seismically outdated old buildings and illegal new construction with shoddy materials. One woman was killed by falling masonry from a church that had suffered damage in a quake centered in Casamicciola in 1883 that killed more than 2,000 people. Another died in the same apartment complex where the family was saved.
Rescuers hailed the courage of the older boys, who spent 14 and 16 hours respectively waiting to be freed, talking with firefighters all the while, eventually receiving water and a flashlight. One o cial credited the older boy, 11-year-old Ciro, with helping save his 8-yearold brother, Mattias, by pushing him out of harm’s way under a bed.
The boys’ grandmother described Ciro as shaken by the ordeal. While Mattias was scared, he also “was sorry because he lost the money in his piggy bank, and lost his toys,” she told the ANSA news agency.
When the quake struck just before 9 p.m. Monday, the boys’ father, Alessandro Toscano, said he was in the kitchen while his wife, Alessia, was in the bathroom and his two older sons in their bedroom.
His wife managed to free herself through the bathroom window, Toscano told RAI state television, while he was rescued soon afterward by firefighters. But the three boys remained trapped when the upper story of the building collapsed. In their bedroom, 11-yearold Ciro pushing Mattias under the bed.
“The gesture surely saved them both,” said Andrea Gentile of the Italian police. “Then with the handle of a broom he knocked against the rubble, making them heard by rescuers.”
The baby, 7-month-old Pasquale, was in the kitchen in a playpen, and the first to be rescued around 4 a.m., seven hours after the quake struck. He cried as rescuers passed him to safety, but looked alert in his still-white onesie. Firefighters said reaching the two older boys was more delicate, requiring them to create a hole in the collapsed ceiling without destabilizing the structure.
Mattias was extricated first, emerging seven hours after his baby brother, covered in cement dust in his underwear as he clung to firefighters. He was quickly strapped onto a stretcher and whisked into an ambulance.
Finally came Ciro, who rescuers said kept the conversation going throughout the ordeal even though one of his legs was immobilized by the rubble. At the hospital emergency room entrance, his parents awaited his arrival, his mother, who is five months pregnant, sitting in a wheel chair alongside his father, whose hand was bandaged from a fracture.