April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Italy’s deadliest earthquake in almost three decades killed at least 150 in the region of Abruzzo today, left tens of thousands without shelter and leveled buildings that had stood for centuries.Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, speaking in a televised interview late today, updated the death toll in the central province of L’Aquila and said 1,500 people were injured.
Rescuers combed through the rubble from the 6.3-magnitude quake, whose epicenter was 95 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Rome. More than 10,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed and as many as 50,000 of the province’s 300,000 people may be homeless, the Civil Protection Agency said.
The quake damaged at least one hospital, a student dormitory, the regional police headquarters, thousands of homes and several churches dating as far back as the 13th century. The quake struck at 3:32 a.m. local time and was felt in Rome for about a minute, shaking buildings and setting off car alarms.
“I was awakened by violent shaking and flakes of paint falling from our ceiling, then a crack opened in the wall behind my bed,” said Rosella Neroni, 66, who lives in Teramo, about 35 miles from the epicenter. “My husband, my daughters who live upstairs and my grandchildren all ran from the house and we spent the night outside.”
Access Routes Cleared
Rescue services managed to clear access routes, while main highways into the area were closed to most traffic. Buses to evacuate survivors were mixed on the roads with heavy equipment for rescue workers and hearses to remove victims.
Some towns were wiped out. In Onna, an agricultural village of about 300 people whose residences are mostly built from stone and plaster, virtually no buildings were left standing. A third of the population may still be missing, rescue workers on the scene said. The parish priest celebrated Mass for victims in a field near some caskets at about 5 p.m., about the time when the first teams with rescue dogs arrived to try to sniff out survivors some 14 hours after the quake.
Further tremors can’t be ruled out, the prime minister told a press conference, adding that sleeping arrangements, including 4,000 hotel rooms, for 10,000 people are being prepared and 4,000 rescue workers have been deployed to the scene. The Italian news agency Ansa said Italy would seek financial assistance from the European Union.
Quake Prediction
The quake came a week after civil emergency officials met in the region to respond to growing concern about a possible earthquake, following a series of tremors in the area. One local researcher had said a major quake may be coming, though local authorities dismissed his research.
“Just as economists cannot predict the direction of stocks, we cannot look into the future,” geophysicist Enzo Boschi, director of the Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome, said in an interview.
Temperatures in the stricken area dipped to about 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight and climbed as high as 16 degrees Celsius during the day. Emergency authorities said they plan to build tent cities for shelter.
Italy’s benchmark S&P/MIB index fell 1.2 percent to 16,690 in Milan, falling from a seven-week high.
Berlusconi declared a state of emergency to speed aid to the region and postponed a trip to Moscow.
Plants Closed
Main rail routes were operating after the high-speed line between Naples and Rome opened at 7 a.m., railway company Ferrovie dello said in an e-mailed statement. Finmeccanica, Italy’s biggest defense company, said it closed two plants in the area.
The epicenter was 6 kilometers northeast of the provincial capital, L’Aquila, a university city of 68,500 in the Abruzzo region whose population swells to around 100,000 during the academic year.
At least seven students were trapped in the ruins of a dormitory in L’Aquila, Ansa reported. The body of one student was recovered from the building. Greek state television channel NET TV reported that one Greek student escaped from the dorm and was in stable condition, though her brother was missing.
Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Theodoros Kassimis told NET TV the Greek embassy is preparing to airlift students to Athens.
The city of L’Aquila, which means eagle in Italian, sits on a hilltop flanked by some of the area’s highest mountains, including the Gran Sasso, which reaches 2,912 meters (9,580 feet). The city is known for churches dating to the 12th century and a fountain of 99 spouts built in 1272. Church-building was spurred when Aquila native Pietro del Morrone became Pope Celestine V.
13th-Century Church
Santa Maria di Collemaggio, a 13th century church built on orders from Celestine, was nearly destroyed by the quake, Sky TG24 television reported. San Liberatore a Maiella, rebuilt in the 11th century after being destroyed by an earthquake in 990, survived the temblor.
Italy lies to the north of a zone where the African and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. The plates continuously rub against each other, sometimes causing earthquakes. A magnitude- 5.9 earthquake in 2002 near Foggia, southeast of the epicenter of today’s quake, killed 29 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Today’s quake was the country’s largest since 1980, when about 3,000 were killed in a quake near Naples, according to the USGS.
Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Greece suffer a higher number of earthquakes than other western European countries because they lie in an active earthquake zone between Europe and Africa. Greece is considered the most seismically active country in Europe.
The head of the Civil Protection Agency, Guido Bertolaso, said the region was hit by “several smaller tremors in the days preceding the quake,” though it wasn’t feasible to evacuate the area. Schools were closed before the earthquake hit as a precaution.
To contact the reporters on this story: Steve Scherer in Onna, Italy, at scherer@bloomberg.net; Flavia Rotondi in Onna, Italy, at frotondi@bloomberg.net.
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