Italy feels the fury of Mother Earth

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Published: April 6, 2009
L’AQUILA, Italy — At twilight on Monday, seven wooden coffins lay on the ground under a gnarled tree in Onna, a tiny village eight miles from here. A woman was slumped in grief over one, while people comforted her. After a few moments, five men strained to lift four coffins into a funeral van.


“They belonged to an entire family: a husband, wife and their two children,” said one of the men, Piero Taffo, who runs a funeral home in L’Aquila.
As the death toll continued to rise late Monday from a powerful earthquake that shook central Italy early in the day, officials said that as many as 150 people had been killed, at least 1,500 injured and tens of thousands left homeless.
The 6.3-magnitude quake seriously damaged historic buildings in the medieval hill towns of the mountainous Abruzzo region east of Rome. The deaths and damage was centered in L’Aquila, a picturesque fortress town at the epicenter, but more than 26 nearby villages were also affected, some seriously. Historic buildings in the surrounding region in the Apennine mountains were also damaged.
“Some towns in the area have been virtually destroyed in their entirety,” Gianfranco Fini, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said in Rome before the chamber observed a moment of silence.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who canceled a trip to Moscow to survey the region by helicopter, declared a state of emergency.
“It’s a disaster never before seen,” said Franco Totani, a lawyer who said he was leaving L’Aquila to stay with an uncle in Rome. “I’ve seen earthquakes before, but this is a catastrophe.”
The narrow streets of L’Aquila’s historic center were filled with rubble, and parked cars were crushed under large blocks of debris. About 80,000 people live in L’Aquila and the surrounding area.
The cupola of the 18th-century Santa Maria del Suffragio church cracked open like an eggshell, exposing the stucco patterns inside the dome. Part of the transept of the 13th-century Santa Maria di Collemaggio basilica collapsed, as did a small cupola in the 18th-century church of Sant’Agostino.
Gianfranco Cioni, an architect in L’Aquila, said the authorities should have warned residents of the threat of an earthquake. “We had three months of tremors, each one stronger than the next,” Mr. Cioni said.
The earthquake struck around 3:30 a.m. Monday and could be felt as far away as Rome, 60 miles to the west, where it rattled furniture and set off car alarms. The United States Geological Survey said it was one of several quakes to hit the region overnight. Among the hardest hit places was Onna, a rural village of less than 400 people. At least 37 residents of the village died, the ANSA news agency reported. Onna’s older two- and three-story stone houses had nearly all been reduced to rubble.
Aftershocks shuddered through the area all day and into the evening, when a driving rain picked up, hampering rescue efforts. People clawed through the debris by hand, frantically seeking survivors.
Mr. Berlusconi said Monday night on national television that 150 people had been killed. But the ANSA news agency reported that officials said that 98 of the dead had been identified, and that another 20 bodies were still unidentified.
Mr. Berlusconi said the government was doing everything “humanly possible” to help those left homeless and would work to rebuild L’Aquila quickly. He said he would be in L’Aquila on Tuesday to assess the situation.
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said rescue workers would work around the clock until all survivors had been found.
A spokesman for Italy’s Civil Protection Agency said on national television that an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people had been left homeless. Electricity, telephone and gas lines were damaged.
In L’Aquila, parts of the main hospital were evacuated because they were at risk of collapsing, The Associated Press reported, and only two operating rooms were in use; bloodied victims waited in hospital hallways or in the courtyard, and many people were being treated in the open.
Four children died in the hospital after their house had collapsed, ANSA reported. Part of a building that housed university students in L’Aquila collapsed, and initial reports said one person had died and seven people were missing. At midday, shaken students and family members sat outside the rubble of the four-story building.
“We’re waiting for my son,” said a woman who declined to give her name. She stood among a knot of anxious onlookers and hid her eyes behind large sunglasses.
Newer buildings in the outer part of the city were also affected. Residents, many still in their pajamas, wheeled dusty suitcases through the streets, on their way out of town.
Outside a damaged convent, a dozen nuns, still dressed in bright orange and blue bathrobes, climbed into a van at midday to go to an assistance center. Sister Lidia, the mother superior, said an 82-year-old nun had died of shock. “The quake, it was very strong,” she said.
By evening, local residents had begun gathering at two stadiums in the town, where rescue workers were setting up 2,000 tents for the homeless.
Outside one stadium, a grief-stricken man could be heard talking on his cellphone. “Alessandro is still under the rubble,” he said.
Gaetana Leone said she had been evacuated from the historic center of the city. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I can’t go back home.”
But Ms. Leone tried to put on a brave face. “We’re the miraculous ones,” she said. “Even if we’ve lost our houses, we’re still alive.”
Speaking on Rainews 24, a new channel on state television, Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s senior civil protection official, said that the earthquake was “comparable if not superior to the one which struck Umbria in 1997.” That quake killed 10 people and damaged medieval buildings across the region, including Assisi’s famed basilica with its Giotto frescoes.
Seismic activity is relatively common in Italy, but the intensity of the earthquake on Monday was rare. It was the worst in Italy since a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Eboli, south of Naples, in 1980, killing more than 2,700 people.
The last major quake to hit central Italy struck the Molise region in 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when their school collapsed.
Rachel Donadio reported from L’Aquila, Italy, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.