Italy readies evacuation plan for G8

L’AQUILA – With the world’s most powerful leaders gathering in this city just three months after a devastating earthquake, Italian security officials have prepared an emergency evacuation plan to airlift the leaders to safety in case of another powerful tremor.

The evacuation plan is part of massive security measures to protect the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations meeting in L’Aquila starting today. Italy is deploying thousands of policemen as it seeks to avoid the violence that marred the last G-8 summit held in this country, when one protester was killed and more than 200 were injured in Genoa in 2001.The April 6 earthquake leveled entire blocks in L’Aquila and the surrounding Abruzzo region, driving some 54 000 from their homes and killing 296 people. Premier Silvio Berlusconi decided to move the summit from a posh Sardinian island to L’Aquila in a show of support to the stricken population.But since April 6, daily aftershocks have hit the area, causing further distress to survivors in tents scattered across the area – and serving as a powerful reminder of the potential dangers facing the world’s leaders. On Friday, a 4.1 magnitude tremor hit just about two kilometres away from the police barracks that will host US President Barack Obama and the other leaders.’I think that there will be some little aftershocks: It’s not like the Earth stands still because Obama gets here and then starts moving again after the G-8 ends,’ Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, said this weekend after the latest shocks.But he stressed that the police barracks serving as the summit venue is solidly shock-proof and runs no risk.Guido Bertolaso, the Civil Protection czar who is in charge of the G-8’s organisation and the relief operation in the quake zone, also played down any risks. He noted that the police complex had resisted the April 6 temblor and said that for it to be endangered ‘there would have to be an earthquake of a strength that has never been seen in L’Aquila.’Still, officials are taking no chances.’An evacuation plan is ready and naturally we are ready with alternative … accommodation in other places,’ Italy’s national police chief Antonio Manganelli said on Monday. A Berlusconi aide, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said that ‘a series of possible emergencies have been studied, and in light of this we feel we can guarantee the maximum security.’- Nampa-AP