Several children yesterday were among more than 25 people unaccounted for, feared dead, after an avalanche engulfed a mountain hotel in earthquake-ravaged central Italy.
The Italian National Civil Protection Department said the Hotel Rigopiano was hit on Wednesday by a 2m wall of snow.
Emergency services were struggling to get ambulances and excavation equipment to the remote site, with the first snow plough only arriving just before midday.
Italian broadcasters showed images of piles of masonry and rubble inside the hotel, which had been moved about 10m from its original location by the force of the snow.
Local officials confirmed that one body had been recovered from the ruins and that two guests who were not inside when the avalanche struck had been found.
Department director Fabrizio Curcio said there had been about 30 guests and staff at the small ski hotel on the eastern lower slopes of the Gran Sasso mountain when the first of four powerful tremors rattled the region on Wednesday morning.
Four earthquakes in four hours stuck on Wednesday, bringing terror to a region still recovering from last year’s series of deadly tremors.
The quakes, all measuring more than magnitude 5, struck close to Amatrice, the mountain town devastated by an earthquake in August last year that left nearly 300 people dead.
And as night fell and temperatures plummeted, fears mounted for isolated residents of remote hamlets cut off by heavy snowfall, while more than 130,000 homes were without electricity.
A mother and child dragged from the ruins of a collapsed country cottage near Teramo in the Abruzzo region were both found to have hypothermia.
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