Earthquake death toll rises to 179

Apr 7 2009

Rescuers have been working frantically through the night in the central Italian city of L'Aquila searching for survivors of the earthquake that has killed 179 and injured more than 1,500.

Upto half a dozen students are still feared trapped in the ruins of a university building.

The quake also hit 26 towns and cities around L'Aquila, which lies in a valley surrounded by the Apennine mountains.

The nearby village of Onna was nearly levelled, with 38 people out of 300 inhabitants killed.

L'Aquila, a city of 70,000, seemed largely empty as tens of thousands of homeless survivors moved to makeshift tent camps to spend the night in chilly mountain air. The survivors were unnerved by the dozens of aftershocks that followed the quake, which struck as residents slept at 3.32am local time on Monday.

Ambulances screamed through L'Aquila as firefighters with dogs and a crane worked feverishly to reach people trapped in fallen buildings, including the university building.

Firefighters reported pulling a 21-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man, both of them Italian, from what was an apartment building where many students rented flats. The building's five storeys had pancaked into one slab of concrete.

Outside the half-collapsed building, part of the University of L'Aquila, tearful young people huddled together, some in their slippers, after being roused from sleep by the quake. Dozens managed to escape as the walls fell around them but hours after the quake, the body of a male student was pulled from the rubble.

Some 10,000 to 15,000 buildings are either damaged or destroyed, and at least 50,000 people have been left homeless.

L'Aquila, capital of the Abruzzo region, was near the epicentre about 70 miles north-east of Rome in a quake-prone region that had felt at least nine smaller jolts since the beginning of April. Italy's National Institute of Geophysics put the magnitude at 5.8. More than a dozen aftershocks followed.