Italy yesterday prepared for an emotional day of mourning with flags across the country to fly at half-mast in honor of the 284 victims of a devastating earthquake.
Grieving families on Friday began burying their dead as rescue workers combing the rubble said they had found no new survivors in the remote mountain villages in central Italy blitzed by Wednesday’s powerful pre-dawn earthquake.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Italian President Sergio Mattarella yesterday attended a funeral service in the city of Ascoli-Piceno for some of the 46 people who died in the mountain villages of Arquata del Tronto and Pescara del Tronto.
Photo: AP
A local gymnasium was transformed into a chapel, where bereaved relatives prayed in front of 30 coffins, including a small, white casket for Giulia, nine, whose body protected her sister, Giorgia, five — one of the last people to be pulled from the rubble alive in Pescara del Tronto.
The first funerals were held on Friday in Pomezia, south of Rome, home of six of the victims, including an eight-year-old boy.
According to the most recent official toll, at least 388 people have been hospitalized with injuries, but no one has been pulled alive from the piles of collapsed masonry since Wednesday evening.
“We will go on searching and digging until we are certain there is no one left,” said Luigi D’Angelo, an Italian Civil Protection officer working in the town of Amatrice, where the death toll stands at 224.
Italian State Forestry Corp officer Valerio Checchi said he expected rescuers to soon start using mechanical diggers to move debris in a sign virtually all hope of finding survivors has gone.
“We will still use thermal devices that can detect the presence of human bodies,” Checchi said.
As powerful aftershocks closed winding mountain roads and made life dangerous for more than 4,000 professionals and volunteers engaged in the rescue effort, survivors voiced dazed bewilderment over the scale of the disaster that struck their sleepy communities.
“I have been through earthquakes before, but this was not a quake, it was an apocalypse,” 66-year-old Anacleto Perotti said.
Perotti, a resident of the tiny hamlet of St Lorenzo Flaviano, has gone back to his house, which survived the eartquake, but he is sleeping in an armchair.
“It is too scary in bed. After a quake comes fear, depression takes you over from the inside,” he said.
Renzi has declared a state of emergency for the regions affected by Wednesday’s earthquake, which occurred in an area that straddles Umbria, Lazio and Marche.
Renzi also released an initial tranche of 50 million euros (US$56 million) in emergency aid.
More than 2,000 people who spent the night in hastily erected tented villages were shaken by a magnitude 4.8 aftershock just after 6am on Friday morning.
More than 900 aftershocks have rattled the region since Wednesday’s earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6-6.2 and triggered the collapse of hundreds of old buildings across dozens of tiny communities playing host to far more people than usual because of the summer holiday.
Earthquake experts estimated that the cost of short-term rescue efforts and longer-term reconstruction could exceed 1 billion euros.
There are also fears of a negative impact on an already stagnating Italian economy, with tourism — which accounts for 4 percent of GDP — certain to take a hit.
However, analysts said the disaster could help Renzi get clearance for reconstruction spending to be excluded from EU calculations of the country’s compliance with budget rules.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not