Prosecutors investigate school collapse
Prosecutors arrived in abandoned San Giuliano di Puglia today to start an investigation into whether anyone was to blame for the deaths of 26 children buried under their school in an earthquake.
As aftershocks continued to rattle residents evacuated to tent cities outside town, attention focused on why the schoolhouse collapsed in Thursday’s 5.4-magnitude quake when most other buildings remained standing.
Three adults also died in the quake – a teacher crushed with her students and two elderly women killed in their homes. But the loss of so many children in a close-knit village of 1,200 weighed most heavily as residents prepared for a mass funeral tomorrow to be attended by Italy’s president.
Italian news reports said that a second storey had been added to the school’s original 1953 structure in recent years. Heavy cement had been applied on the upper level, the reports said, suggesting the added weight may have helped bring down the building.
Questions also mounted about why the entire region – about 130km (80 miles) north-east of Naples – had not been declared a quake-prone zone, particularly after a 1980 quake in the Naples area killed 2,570 people and left 30,000 homeless.
Such a designation would have required stiffer building codes in a part of Italy where illegal, substandard construction is widespread.
Investigating magistrates inspected the site today and said their probe would look into whether manslaughter or negligence charges were warranted considering how unusual the school’s destruction was.
“It’s an anomalous situation, the collapse of an entire building,” prosecutor Andrea Cataldi Tassone told reporters at the scene. “So we must determine if there is possible responsibility.”
“We in the state, we don’t know anything. We must acquire documentation and then make a technical verification of the case,” he added.
He and other prosecutors stressed that no-one was under investigation and that there was no information yet pointing to anyone responsible.
He spoke to reporters in the eerily quiet village, evacuated on Friday after two aftershocks – one measuring 5.3 – rumbled the earth again, temporarily halting recovery of the last victims from the school.
The engineer who designed the school renovations, Giuseppe La Serra, 48, told the ANSA news agency that he added two classrooms – not an entire storey – on to the school structure and that the renovations were done in complete conformity with regulations. He denied heavy cement had been used.
Had the building been zoned as a quake-prone area, the renovations would have been carried out to a higher standard, he said.
“I think about these children who died, I think continuously and I haven’t slept for days,” La Serra was quoted as saying. “But I repeat, my conscience is clear and I would have wanted to be there with the firemen to dig.”
Most buildings in San Giuliano were damaged by Thursday’s quake, and officials said there was no indication of when residents would be allowed to return home.
“We will be able to repair some buildings other buildings will have to be demolished,” said Dante Ambrosini, the chief firefighter for the Molise region. ”Other buildings which are of historic or architectural importance will be renovated – but we can’t give a time estimate.”
Residents were allowed to go home briefly today – accompanied by firefighters - to fetch their belongings for what appeared to be an extended life as refugees.
“We’ve seen these scenes on television, and now we find ourselves in a tent camp,” an incredulous and unshaven Giuseppe Iacurto said as he walked around the encampment with his 10-year-old son, Paolo, one of the first to be pulled out of the schoolhouse.
The boy, who bore a thick gash on his forehead and another scar on his leg, said he was still frightened from the quake, which killed his two cousins.
“When I was sleeping I heard shaking,” he said. “I woke up and it was only some trucks going by.”
In addition to San Giuliano, at least 21 other towns and villages in the Molise and Puglia regions were affected by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, said Guido Bertolaso, the national director for the Italian civil defence department
Authorities ordered a total of 5,500 people to be evacuated, and had so far provided 500 tents, accommodating 2,800 people, and 190 trailers for the newly homeless.
The large blue tents, housing about six people each, were bare and sterile inside, with cots and portable radiators.
Bertolaso stressed that authorities hoped to find alternative accommodations for the homeless since rain and cold over the next few weeks would make long-term tent life untenable.
He said 1,400 volunteers, 600 firefighters and 600 soldiers had been deployed across the region for the emergency effort.
Despite the stepped-up humanitarian response, residents remained distraught over their loss, and a steady stream of visitors paid their respects at the gymnasium-turned-morgue where the families of the victims held vigil.
“They’ve lost all the things that are dear to them,” said Mario Fredianelli, a senior civil defence worker at the San Giuliano tent camp. “They can’t see a certain future.”
Amid confusion over the final toll, the school’s principal, Giuseppe Colombo, confirmed that all nine students in the first grade had died, wiping out the village’s generation of 6-year-olds.
“Our job now is to make sure that those who survived are not traumatised by their memory of those who died,” Colombo said.
When asked whether the school would be rebuilt on the same site, he said: “We have to choose another place and cancel the memory of this place completely.”
