Italy is once more facing up to its failure to protect people from seismic disaster, as the toll from the earthquake that flattened three ancient hilltop towns soared and rescuers continued their desperate search for survivors.
After rescue teams using sniffer dogs, bulldozers and their bare hands worked through the night and on through the following day, the national civil protection agency said at least 250 people had died in the 6.2-magnitude quake.
Another 365 were being treated in hospital, it said, while an unknown number remained trapped in the rubble of collapsed and damaged buildings. At least 470 aftershocks have shaken the area since the quake struck in the early hours of Wednesday, some as strong as magnitude 5.1.
As the prime minister, Matteo Renzi, promised in Rome to “rebuild and start again” in “these beautiful towns, with their wonderful past that will never end”, questions were mounting about how it was possible, once again, for so many lives to have been lost in an area long known to be the most seismically hazardous in Europe.
Experts estimate that some 70% of Italy’s buildings are not built to anti-seismic standards, with codes routinely not applied to older buildings when they are refurbished, and not respected at all when new ones are built.
In Amatrice, the town hardest hit by Wednesday’s quake, the 13th-century civic tower, its clock frozen at 3.39am, three minutes after the tremor struck, was still standing on Thursday. The Romolo Capranica school, restored in 2012 and supposedly to anti-seismic standards, was not.
Mario, the father of two small boys, said he was still in shock. “We slept in the car last night, though with the quakes it was hard to sleep at all,” he said. “We’ve booked a tent for tonight. But then tomorrow, the next day?”
One of the youngest victims of Wednesday’s earthquake was an 18-month-old girl whose mother had moved to the area after surviving a 2009 quake in L’Aquila – just a few miles to the south – that killed 300 people.
After that disaster, the government set aside nearly €1bn for upgrading buildings in the region – but take-up has been desperately low, in part, critics say, because of the heavy bureaucracy involved.
“Here, in the middle of a seismic zone, nothing has ever been done,” said Dario Nanni of the Italian architects’ council. “It does not cost much more, when renovating a building, to make it comply with earthquake standards. But less than 20% do.”
Nanni said the quake’s impact had been exacerbated by the widespread use of concrete rather than wooden beams. “These indestructible beams hit walls like a hammer,” he told AFP. “That is what made so many houses collapse.”