Avalanche buries hotel in Italy
Print Edition
A HUGE avalanche swallowed up a luxury mountain hotel in central Italy following a series of strong earthquakes that rocked the area, burying up to 30 people under tons of snow and debris, officials said yesterday.
Italian media said three bodies had been retrieved from the site. Rescue workers declined to comment on the reports, but said they had yet to find any sign of life.
The gabled peaks of parts of the roof and a row of windows were the only sections of the four-story Hotel Rigopiano still visible after the wall of snow smashed into the four-star spa resort early on Wednesday evening.
Local authorities said about 30 people had been in the building at the time, including two children, but more than 20 hours later, only a couple of survivors had been found — two men who had been outside when the disaster struck.
“The hotel is almost completely destroyed. We’ve called out but we’ve heard no replies, no voices,” said Antonio Crocetta, a member of the Alpine Rescue squad who was on the scene.
“We’re digging and looking for people,” he told reporters by phone from the isolated location in the Gran Sasso mountain range in the central Abruzzo region.
Rescue workers entered what appeared to be a lobby decorated with oil paintings and plants, where a landslide had torn through a wall, television footage showed.
Mattresses and furniture were spotted dozens of meters away, local media reported, and sniffer dogs were brought to the area to help locate possible survivors.
“I am alive because I went to get something from my car,” one of the two survivors, Giampiero Parete, told medical staff.
Italian media said he had been on holiday with his wife and two children, who were all still missing.
Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni called for national unity, saying Italy was caught in an “unprecedented vice” of earthquakes and heavy snows simultaneously.
The rescue operation was hampered by meters of snow which has fallen on the Gran Sasso in recent days. Drifts made snow as deep as five meters in some places and snowplows struggled to cut a path up winding mountain roads.
The first rescuers only managed to arrive at 4:30am yesterday after having to ski through a blizzard to reach the site. After dawn broke, emergency services were sent in helicopters.
A base camp for rescue workers was set up in the town of Penne, some 10 kilometers away, where ambulances waited.
Reports said the avalanche shunted the 43-room hotel, which is 1,200 meters above sea level, some 10 meters down the hill.
The disaster struck just hours after four earthquakes with a magnitude of above 5.0 hit central Italy.
Italian media said hotel guests had checked out and were waiting for a snowplow to arrive to open up the road and let them down the mountain. However, the avalanche struck before they had left.
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