Avalanche flattens hotel; 30 missing
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.
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. “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.
Video shot by rescuers showed huge piles of snow and debris inside hotel corridors, stairwells and the indoor pool area.