Dozens missing after avalanche hits hotel
PENNE, 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 the Gran Sasso range, 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 as much as 9 feet of 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 on site.
Accounts emerged of hotel guests messaging rescuers and friends for help Wednesday, with at least one attempt at raising the alarm rebuffed for several hours.
Rescue teams had tried to reach the scene in a snowplow but were blocked by fallen trees and rocks. They used cross-country skis for the final 4-mile twohour journey and found two people — a guest and a hotel maintenance worker, in a car in the resort’s parking lot.
There were no other signs of life.