Ten people have been found alive in the rubble of an Italian hotel Friday, two days after an avalanche tore through the mountain resort near Farindola, Italian firefighters say.
Half of those, including four children, have been pulled from the rubble, but rescue workers are still trying to extract the remaining five from the collapsed buildings of the Hotel Rigopiano northeast of Rome.
"Today is a day of hope. There's a miracle under way," said Ilario Lacchetta, mayor of Farindola, told the Associated Press.
Crews reportedly located people alive in the hotel kitchen, an incredible discovery that boosted spirits two days after the massive snow slide buried around 30 people in the resort.
"We're pulling them out. Send us a helicopter," a rescuer said over firefighters' radio, overheard by AP photographer Gregorio Borgia who was making his way on foot toward the disaster site.
Video released by rescuers showed a boy, wearing blue snow pants and a matching ski shirt, emerging from the structure and crews mussing his hair in celebration.
Next was a woman with a long ponytail wearing red snow pants. "Brava Brava!" the rescuers cheered. The survivors appeared fully alert and walking on their own. Both were helped down to a stretcher for the helicopter ride out.
Titi Postiglione, operations chief of the civil protection
agency, said the survivors "can give us a series of indications to help
with our intervention plan, information to understand what happened and
help direct the search."
Giampiero Parete, who
survived the initial incident called for rescue crews, was reunited with
his wife, Adriana Vranceanu, 43, and 8-year-old son Gianfilippo, at a
hospital in the nearby city of Pescara, ANSA news agency and state-run
RAI radio told the AP.
Rescue workers were still
searching for their daughter, 6-year-old Ludovica, after her mother
indicated she was alive under the debris.
About
30 people were initially trapped inside the luxury Hotel Rigopiano when
the avalanche dumped up to 17 feet of snow on the hotel on Wednesday
afternoon.
"We are hoping that the ceiling
collapsed partially in some places and that someone remained
underneath," rescuer Lorenzo Gagliardi told SKY Tg24.
Two bodies were recovered on the first day of searching and RAI state TV reported two more had been located but not yet removed.
An aerial view of the Rigopiano Hotel hit by an avalanche in Farindola, Italy, early Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017.(Italian Firefighters via AP)
The
operations have been hampered by difficulty in accessing the remote
hotel. Workers have been clearing a 5.5-mile road to bring in heavier
equipment but it can handle only one-way traffic.
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
Wednesday, just as the first of four powerful earthquakes struck the
region.
It wasn't clear if the quakes triggered
the avalanche. But emergency responders said the force of the massive
snow slide collapsed a wing of the hotel that faced the mountain and
rotated another off its foundation, pushing it downhill.
"The
situation is catastrophic," said Gagliardi of the Alpine rescue
service, who was among the first at the scene. "The mountain-facing side
is completely destroyed and buried by snow: the kitchen, hotel rooms,
hall."
One of the survivors reported that the
guests had all checked out and were waiting for the road to be cleared
to be able to leave. The snow plow scheduled for mid afternoon never
arrived, and the avalanche hit sometime around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Prosecutors
have opened a manslaughter investigation in the tragedy, and among the
hypotheses being pursued is whether the avalanche threat wasn't taken
seriously enough, according to Italian media.
Farindola
Mayor Ilario Lacchetta said the hotel had 24 guests, four of them
children, and 12 employees were onsite at the time of the avalanche.
An
Alpine rescue team was the first to arrive on cross-country skis after a
seven-kilometer, two-hour journey, finding Giampaolo Parete, a guest
who escaped the avalanche when he went to his car to get something, and
Fabio Salzetta, a hotel maintenance worker, in a car in the resort's
parking lot.
Parete, whose wife and two children
remain among the missing, was taken to a hospital while Salzetta stayed
behind with rescuers to help identify where guests might be buried and
how crews could enter the buildings, rescuers said.
The
mountainous region of central Italy has been struck by a series of
quakes since August that destroyed homes and historic centers in dozens
of towns and hamlets. A deadly quake in August killed nearly 300. No one
died in strong aftershocks in October, largely because population
centers had already been evacuated.
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