A woman, still alive 20 hours after an earthquake, is carried by rescue volunteers. Photograph: Giulio Piscitelli/AFP/Getty Images
John Hooper in L’Aquila and David Batty guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 April 2009 09.09 BST
Rescuers continued searching for survivors this morning after a powerful aftershock brought two apartment blocks crashing down in the stricken city of L’Aquila, causing panic among rescue workers and survivors of Monday’s deadly earthquake.
Officials said today that the death toll from Italy’s worst earthquake for more than 30 years now stood at 250, with 11 of the victims yet to be identified. The first funeral of a victim was due to take place today, in the town of Loreto Aprutino, led by the archbishop of Pescara.
The aftershocks caused chunks of masonry to fall from damaged buildings, including parts of the basilica in L’Aquila, and the tremor – measured by the US Geological Survey at magnitude 5.6 – was felt as far away as Rome.
A 76-year-old Roman man was reported to have died of a heart attack following the tremor, according to Reuters.
Within minutes of the aftershock L’Aquila resounded again to the scream of sirens as police and rescue workers rushed to the scene.
“In the last two nights, I’ve slept three hours at most. I feel physically and mentally tired from the lack of sleep and the fear,” Ilaria Ciani, 35, who spent the night in a large blue tent at a survivors’ camp near the city, told Reuters.
Working by floodlight, rescuers used a crane to slowly dismantle a collapsed university dormitory in the centre of L’Aquila and later dragged out the bodies of two of the four students still missing. The students’ residence has been a focus of the rescue operation since early on Monday, shortly after the earthquake that devastated the city and several of the surrounding towns and villages.
Sergio Basti, the Rome fire brigade engineer leading the operation, said relatives of the four young people who were sleeping in the residence when the earthquake struck had been briefed on what was going to happen. Two missing students were brought out alive from the residence early on Tuesday. Yesterday morning, a third student was found dead.
Rescuers burst into applause yesterday when a 20-year-old girl was found alive 42 hours after the quake in the ruins of a four-storey building.
“A rescue like this is worth six months work,” Claudio, a fireman from Venice, told Reuters.
Authorities estimate 17,000 people have lost their homes in the quake and 20 tent camps and 16 field kitchens have been set up to provide hot food and accommodation for survivors.
Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, told a press conference in L’Aquila that the search for the living would go on for another 48 hours. But it was clear that in some places, the chances of finding survivors alive had already been written off.
Next to the Piazzale Paoli park, where a block of flats had collapsed outwards under the force of the shockwaves, an earth mover was vigorously gouging through the rubble in a way that suggested the rescuers no longer feared disturbing survivors.
What chances remained of discovering survivors depended on increasingly delicate probing. A few hundred metres from the students’ residence, on the other side of a severely cracked bridge, four Spanish rescue workers were taking a break after working through the night.
None of them had slept since the previous morning. They had just emerged from a nearby house after penetrating to the basement.
“We are waiting for a special instrument that can pick up vibrations,” said Angelina Molina of the Málaga-based voluntary group GEA, as she took a long drag on her cigarette.
“It can pick up even the slightest vibration, even that caused by someone scratching his or her nail on a wall,” added her colleague Gabriel Leo.
The periodic wail of sirens and occasional clatter of a helicopter notwithstanding, L’Aquila was like a ghost town yesterday.
Berlusconi said: “Other tremors are possible and the message to the population is not to go back home.”
By then, however, a few had already dared to do so. Donatella di Sibio, a 33-year-old shop worker, could not bring herself to leave her parrot behind.
“The staircase has partly collapsed. It’s dangerous,” she agreed as the parrot sat contentedly on its perch in a cage at her feet. Di Sibio had even brought out some parrot food, along with a handful of specially treasured possessions that her mother had stuffed in a plastic bag.
“That was my grandmother,” she said, pointing to a sepia photograph sticking out from the bag.
“I’ve lived there all my life,” said Di Sibio, looking at the 18th-century building in which she and her parents shared a flat. “We’d just got it done up. We spent a lot of money on restoring it. The work finished last month. And now it’s wrecked.”
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