More than 30 people trapped in avalanche at Italian ski resort

FARINDOLA, Italy — Rescue crews who reached the four-star mountain resort on skis found only eerie silence Thursday after a huge avalanche flattened the hotel, trapping more than 30 people inside. Two bodies were recovered, but the search for survivors was hampered by heavy snowfall and fears the buildings would collapse.

Two people escaped the devastation at the Hotel Rigopiano in the mountains of central Italy and called for help. But it took hours for responders to verify their claims and arrive at the remote earthquake-stricken zone. They worked through the night, but hopes were dimming of finding survivors.

Days of heavy snowfall had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many central Italian towns and hamlets, and the hotel phones went down early Wednesday, just as the first of four powerful earthquakes struck the region.

It wasn’t clear if the quakes triggered the avalanche. But emergency responders said the force of the massive snow slide collapsed a wing of the hotel that faced the mountain and rotated another off its foundation, pushing it downhill.

“The situation is catastrophic,” said Marshall Lorenzo Gagliardi of the alpine rescue service, who was among the first at the scene. “The mountain-facing side is completely destroyed and buried by snow: the kitchen, hotel rooms, hall.”

The hotel in the mountain town of Farindola in Italy’s Abruzzo region, is about 30 miles from the coastal city of Pescara, at an altitude of about 3,940 feet. The area, which has been buried under snowfall for days, is located in the broad swath of central Italy that was jolted by Wednesday’s quakes, one of which had a 5.7 magnitude.

Farindola Mayor Ilario Lacchetta estimated that more than 30 people were unaccounted for: the hotel had 24 guests, four of them children, and 12 employees onsite.

Accounts emerged of guests messaging friends for help Wednesday, with at least one attempt at raising the alarm rebuffed for several hours.

Giampiero Parete, a chef vacationing at the hotel, called his boss when the avalanche struck and begged him to mobilize rescue crews. His wife Adriana and two children, Ludovica, 6, and Gianfilippo, 8, were trapped inside, restaurant owner Quintino Marcella told The Associated Press.

Parete had left the hotel briefly to get some medicine from the car for his wife, and survived as a result.

“He said the hotel was submerged and to call rescue crews,” Marcella said, adding that he phoned police and the Pescara prefect’s office, but that no one believed him because the hotel had reported it was fine a few hours earlier.

“The prefect’s office said it wasn’t true, because everything was OK at the hotel.”

Marcella said he insisted, and called other emergency numbers until a civil protection official finally took him seriously and mobilized a rescue at 8 p.m., more than two hours later.

Rescue teams had tried to reach the scene in a snowplow but were blocked by fallen trees and rocks. They used crosscountry skis for the final seven-kilometer, two-hour journey and found Parete and Fabio Salzetta, a hotel maintenance worker, in a car in the resort’s parking lot.

There were no other signs of life.