30 missing in Italy after avalanche buries hotel

Rescue workers were met with an eerie silence on Thursday when they reached a four-star spa hotel struck by an avalanche in a mountainous earthquake-stricken region of central Italy. At least 30 people were missing, including at least two children, authorities said.

Guests at the three-story Hotel Rigopiano in the central Abruzzo region alerted emergency workers to the disaster on Wednesday, following a series of quakes in the region.

"Help, we're dying of cold," one couple told rescuers, according to the ANSA news agency. Another man, identified by news reports as Fabio Salzetta, sent an SMS message saying he had escaped with a maintenance worker, but that others were trapped inside.

Corriere della Sera quoted the text message as saying: "Some walls were knocked down." And: "I'm outside with a maintenance worker but you can't see anything of the hotel, there's only a wall of snow in front of me."

When rescuers on skis arrived on Thursday morning, they found just two people alive, media reported. Civil protection authorities said that 30 people were missing. The ANSA news agency quoted a rescuer as saying that there were fatalities, but details weren't available. Just one body was reported removed from the hotel by late morning on Thursday.

One of those saved was 38-year-old Giampaolo Parete, who said he had gone outside to get something from his car, which was untouched by the avalanche, but that his wife and two children were buried inside.

Rescue efforts were hampered by the large snowfall in recent days, making it difficult to clear roads for heavy vehicles and ambulances to get through.

The buried hotel was just one of several rescues underway in an area that has been pummeled by more than a meter of snow in recent days and storms that have knocked out power and phone lines and blocked roads, isolating towns and hamlets.

Video footage showed a gray-haired man being led to safety by rescuers through a path dug out of deep snow from another rescue in the region.

Snow continued to fall throughout the region, with reports of people being isolated in many places. A resident of a town in the province of Teramo, Daiana Nguyen, told SKY TG24 that three meters of snow had fallen and that people "were completely isolated".

The timing of the avalanche on Wednesday and the messages remained unclear, but the hotel posted a notice on its Facebook page that its phones were down around 9 am following the first of Wednesday's quakes, including one at magnitude-5.7. It wasn't immediately clear if the temblors triggered the avalanche.

Video shot by rescue teams showed huge piles of filthy snow and debris piled up inside corridors, stairwells and an indoor pool area, having slammed through the outer walls of the building. The audio is silent. The largest wall of snow shown was in the pool area, where plastic lounge chairs were flipped on their sides and Christmas decorations still dangled from the ceiling.

The hotel is about 50 kilometers from the coastal city of Pescara, at an altitude of about 1,200 meters.

(China Daily 01/20/2017 page12)