Over 70 die and 1 500 injured in Italian quake

L’AQUILA – A powerful earthquake in mountainous central Italy knocked down whole blocks of buildings early yesterday as residents slept, killing more than 70 people in the country’s deadliest quake in nearly three decades, officials said.

Tens of thousands were homeless and 1 500 were injured.Ambulances screamed through the medieval city L’Aquila as firefighters with dogs worked feverishly to reach people trapped in fallen buildings, including a dormitory where half a dozen university students were believed still inside.Outside the half-collapsed building, tearful young people huddled together, wrapped in blankets, some still in their slippers after being roused from sleep by the quake. Dozens managed to escape as the walls fell around them.’We managed to come down with other students but we had to sneak through a hole in the stairs as the whole floor came down,’ said Luigi Alfonsi, 22. ‘I was in bed – it was like it would never end as I heard pieces of the building collapse around me.’In the historic centre of the city, a wall of the 13th century Santa Maria di Collemaggio church collapsed and the bell tower of the Renaissance San Bernadino church also fell. The 16th castle housing the Abruzzo National Museum was damaged.L’Aquila, capital of the Abruzzo region, was near the epicentre about 110 kilometres northeast of Rome. It is a quake-prone region that has had at least nine smaller jolts since the beginning of April. The quake struck at 03h32. The US Geological Survey said the big quake was magnitude 6.3, but Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics put it at 5.8 and more than a dozen aftershocks followed.The quake hit 26 towns and cities around L’Aquila, which lies in a valley surrounded by the Apennine mountains. Castelnuovo, a hamlet of about 300 people 25 kilometres southeast of L’Aquila, appeared hard hit, and five were confirmed dead there. Another small town, Onno, was almost completely levelled.’A few houses have remained standing, but just a few,’ Stefania Pezzopane, provincial president of L’Aquila, told Corriere della Sera.L’Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente said about 100,000 people were homeless. It was not clear if that estimate included surrounding towns. Some 10,000 to 15,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed, officials said.Premier Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency, freeing up federal funds to deal with the disaster, and canceled a visit to Russia so he could deal with the quake crisis.Condolences poured in from around the world, including from President Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI and Abdullah Gul, president of quake-prone Turkey.The last major quake to hit central Italy was a 5.4-magnitude temblor that struck the south-central Molise region on October 31, 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when their school collapsed. – Nampa-AP