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Italian avalanche rescuers pull survivors from hotel rubble | |
(about 4 hours later) | |
Rescuers are continuing to pull survivors from the wreckage of a hotel in central Italy that was flattened by an avalanche on Wednesday. | |
A firefighters’ spokesman, Luca Cari, said so far 10 people had been found alive under the debris of the Rigopiano hotel in Farindola, in the lower Gran Sasso mountains. | |
Cari gave the update late on Friday afternoon as rescuers worked to extract the people, who were being taken by helicopter to a hospital in Pescara on the Adriatic coast. Rescuers said four bodies had been found. | |
As many as 34 guests, staff and visitors are believed to have been inside the hotel when the avalanche hit on Wednesday afternoon, dumping more than five metres of snow on the building which sits 1,200 metres (3,940ft) above sea level. | |
Most of the guests were thought to have been in or around the hotel’s entrance at the time. They had been waiting for transport to take them home after earthquakes hit the region earlier in the day. | |
Video footage showed firefighters clapping and cheering after they pulled a boy called Gianfilippo from a hole they had cut in the snow-buried roof with a power saw. A little later the boy’s mother, Adriana Vranceanu, 43, was brought out. | |
Her husband, Giampiero Parete, escaped the avalanche because he had gone to their car to get medication for his wife shortly before the avalanche hit. | |
They were were reunited at the hospital in Pescara on Friday. The fate of their daughter, Ludovica, who was also inside the building, was unclear. | |
One of the rescuers said the survivors seemed to have been able to light fires to keep themselves warm. “We saw smoke, there were a few small fires in the rubble, and where there is fire there is air so we started to dig,” Marco Bini told Agence France-Presse. | |
He said six people had been found together in an air pocket, including a mother and child. “They were all in reasonable health, if very cold. The fire will have been using up the oxygen so we were lucky to find them. | |
“Their faces said it all; it was like they had been reborn. After all the work we are overjoyed to have found them alive.” | |
Scores of mountain police, firefighters and other emergency personnel had been deployed to the hotel by Friday morning. But progress was proving slow, with rescuers wary of triggering further movements in the snow which could endanger anyone still alive below the rubble. | |
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 on Wednesday when the first of four earthquakes struck. | |
They hit near Amatrice, one of the towns destroyed by an earthquake in August that left almost 300 people dead and thousands homeless. Two powerful tremors struck the area in late October, but no one was killed then because the inhabited areas affected had already been evacuated. | |
It was not clear if the quakes triggered the avalanche, but emergency responders said the force of it demolished a wing of the hotel that faced the mountain and rotated another off its foundations, pushing it downhill. | It was not clear if the quakes triggered the avalanche, but emergency responders said the force of it demolished a wing of the hotel that faced the mountain and rotated another off its foundations, pushing it downhill. |
One of the survivors reported that the guests had all checked out and were waiting for the road to be cleared so they could leave. The snow plough scheduled for mid-afternoon never arrived and the avalanche hit at about 5.30pm. | |
Prosecutors have opened a manslaughter investigation, with one line of inquiry being whether the avalanche threat was taken seriously enough, according to Italian media. | |
Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report | |