Avalanche traps dozens in hotel
DOZENS FEARED DEAD AS AVALANCHE BURIES HOTEL
Giampiero Parete stepped outside the Italian hotel for just a minute, to fetch some medicine for his wife from their car.
Within seconds, the Hotel Rigopiano, with his wife and two children inside, had been obliterated. An avalanche, a voracious 300-metre snow slide, had roared down the mountainside, uprooting trees in its path and burying most of the resort.
“I saved myself because I’d gone to pick something up from the car,” said Parete, a 38-year-old chef who was vacationing at the four-star spa and resort. “The avalanche came and I was buried by snow but I managed to get out. The car was not buried, so I stayed there and waited for rescue operators.”
It took hours for responders on skis to reach the re- mote hotel, located off a hairpin-path alpine road in the Gran Sasso mountain range in earthquake-stricken central Italy.
Plaintive text messages were sent to emergency numbers by those buried inside, according to the state-run ANSA news agency. “Help, we’re dying of cold,” one couple wrote rescuers.
But rescuers described only silence Thursday as they arrived and struggled to move the tightly packed snow that covered half the hotel’s toppled walls. There were no signs of life from the estimated 30 people trapped inside.
Immediately after the avalanche hit, Parete had called his employer, Quintino Marcella, and begged him to mobilize rescue crews.
“He said the hotel was submerged and to call rescue crews,” Marcella said, adding that he phoned police and the local prefect’s office, but no one believed him.
Marcella said he insisted, and called other emergency numbers until someone finally took him seriously and mobilized a rescue at 8 p.m., more than two hours later.
When rescuers on skis arrived at the hotel in the early morning hours of Thursday, they found just two people alive: Parete and Fabio Salzetta, identified by Italian media as a hotel maintenance worker.
“There are so many dead,” Antonio Crocetta of the local alpine rescue workers told ANSA. “The avalanche was huge.”
Days of heavy snowfall had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many central Italian towns and hamlets, and four powerful earthquakes struck the region on Wednesday.
It wasn’t immediately clear if any of the quakes triggered the avalanche. But firefighters said the sheer violence of the snow slide was overwhelming.
“There are mattresses that are hundreds of metres away from where the build- ing was,” firefighters’ spokesman Luca Cari told ANSA.
The hotel in the Abruzzo region is about 45 kilometres from the coastal city of Pescara, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres. The area, which has been buried under as much as three metres 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.
Walter Milan, spokesman for the National Alpine rescue corps, said rescue teams tried to reach the site in a snowplow but were blocked by uprooted trees and rocks on the road. Crews donned cross-country skis for the final seven-kilometre, twohour stretch to reach the hotel.
By Thursday afternoon, two bodies had been removed.