Distraught village plans funeral for quake victims
Authorities in Italy working through seismic aftershocks today made final preparations for a mass funeral for 29 victims of Thursday's earthquake.
All but three victims were children, crushed when their school collapsed.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was to attend the service for the victims of the 5.4-magnitude quake, which cut down a swathe of the younger generation in this village of San Giuliano Di Puglia and forced the rest to evacuate to a tent city.
Prosecutors arrived yesterday to investigate whether anyone was to blame for the school’s collapse amid suggestions that shoddy construction in a quake-prone area may have contributed to the toll.
Investigating magistrates inspected the site and said they would look into whether manslaughter or negligence charges were warranted.
While most buildings in the village sustained some damage, the school, originally built in 1953, was one of the few buildings that was completely destroyed.
“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.”
He and other prosecutors stressed that no one was under investigation and that there was no information yet pointing to anyone responsible.
Italian news reports said yesterday that a second storey had been added to the original 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 – 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.
The engineer who designed the school renovations, Giuseppe La Serra, 48, told the ANSA news agency yesterday that he added two classrooms – not an entire storey – onto the structure and that the renovations conformed to 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,” Mr 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.”
In addition to San Giuliano, at least 21 other towns and villages in the Molise and Puglia regions were rattled by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, said Guido Bertolaso, the national director for the Italian civil defence department.
More than 140 people from across the area remained in hospital yesterday in the Molise region alone, the AGI news agency said.
Authorities ordered a total of 5,500 people evacuated, and had so far provided 500 tents, accommodating 2,800 people, and 190 trailers for the newly homeless, Mr Bertolaso said.
He stressed that authorities hoped to find alternative accommodations since rains and cold over the next few weeks would make long-term tent life untenable.
Despite the stepped-up humanitarian response, residents remained distraught over their loss, and a steady stream of visitors bearing flowers paid their respects yesterday at the gymnasium-turned-morgue where the families of the victims held vigil.
The school’s principal, Giuseppe Colombo, confirmed yesterday that all nine students in the first grade had died, wiping out the village’s six-year-olds.
