EYEWITNESS:Under the mounds of rubble, hopes of survival are fading as workers find more bodies, writes PADDY AGNEW.
SAN GREGORIO is the sort of place where you would never stop. It is, or indeed was, a little hamlet that hides behind two football pitches on the main statale road leading from Pescara on the Adriatic coast to L’Aquila in Abruzzo. Yesterday, however, there were a lot of vehicles stopped at San Gregorio.
It is just one of the many little villages in and around L’Aquila which have not so much been damaged as totally destroyed by Monday morning’s tremendous earthquake. Standing in what was piazza San Gregorio, or the little hamlet’s one-time main square, you might as well be in one of those villages in Flanders after another major first World War offensive.
Wherever you look, there is just rubble, lots of it. A car – it might have been a Citroën – looks like it has been used as a prop for a Road Runner cartoon, given that it has been reduced to one long, very low-lying piece of crumpled metal. The town’s church, which sits on one side of the piazza, no longer has a roof, while one end-wall totters in splendid isolation, with the church’s cross looking as if it will fall over and bring down what remains of the building.
If half the buildings in the city of L’Aquila have been damaged, then 90 per cent have been wiped out in a village like San Gregorio.
Just one kilometre down the statale is another hamlet, Onna, where at least 40 of the 350 residents died in the quake.
On Monday afternoon, 20 coffins were lined up in a neat row on the equivalent of the village green.
In San Gregorio, groups of rescue workers stand around. It would be nice to say there is a sense of urgency. Yet there is not. Three people from San Gregorio were unaccounted for but two of them had already been found, dead unfortunately, by yesterday morning.
Antonio, one of the thousands of volunteers who have travelled to Abruzzo to help with the rescue, tells me there is little hope the third person will be found alive.
Like all the other rescue workers, Antonio is tired. He has been part of the digging and searching since he arrived here from Campobasso in southern Italy on Monday. Like just about everyone else, be they firemen, Red Cross or Protezione Civile, he has had one hour of sleep since Sunday night.
As he talks to me, a shout goes up, followed by a sickening thud. Another piece of heavy masonry has just hit the ground, luckily causing no damage. The rescue work, however, is all too clearly dangerous since moving serious mounds of debris in the forlorn hope that someone might still be alive down there can also cause further building collapse.
Down from the village towards the Pescara-L’Aquila road, the two football pitches have been commandeered and are now one of the five tented villages around L’Aquila. At midday yesterday, the San Gregorio tents were empty but the Red Cross workers had no doubt that, come night, the tents would be welcoming families.
The curious thing is that, even though the Protezione Civile has taken over no less than 4,000 hotel rooms on the Adriatic coast (some 8,000-10,000 beds), many of the people of L’Aquila and villages like San Gregorio prefer to stay close to home. For a start, people want to keep an eye on their property, or what remains of it, and its contents. And there are family pets to be looked after. Down at the main tented village in L’Aquila itself, Signora Giovanna explains: “What are we going to do? Papa has four dogs at home, how are they going to manage? Someone has to feed them.”
Seventy-year-old “Papa” sits on a chair outside his tent, chopping up an apple. Like a lot of the older folk around here, he seems entirely resigned to his fate. On Monday night, however, he preferred to sleep in his car. And, like many, he is worried by the series of terrifying after-tremors that continue to afflict the region.
Venezuelan Lorenzo Garcia, of Italian extraction and married to a woman from L’Aquila, is another who preferred to sleep in his car on Monday night. He was the night porter at the Duca Degli Abruzzi hotel, whose front completely collapsed on Monday morning.
He talks of how he shoved and pushed the hotel guests out the back of the building in the midst of chaos rendered all the more difficult by electricity failure and a cloud of masonry dust that made it hard to breathe.
He is proud to report that all of the guests got out alive. Yet, like a lot of the earthquake survivors, he is still wandering around in a daze. He might have saved his guests but, in a few terrifying minutes, not only was his family home badly damaged but so were the houses of his two adult sons and that of his mother-in-law.
Furthermore, his car was one of those crushed. As if all that were not bad enough, he has now lost his job, given that the Duca Degli Abruzzi is closed for business and looks likely to remain that way for a long time.
You might expect Lorenzo to be feeling sorry for himself. No way – he is the first to acknowledge that he is lucky to be alive. He tells me of a Sicilian woman, one of the hotel guests he escorted through the chaos, who rang him yesterday to thank him.
“My life began again anew yesterday, thanks to you,” she told him.
Lorenzo, too, has no desire to take up the hotel rooms on offer in Pescara. If he did that, then the family would be split up and, despite all the discomfort, he prefers a united family in a tent to a divided family in separate hotel rooms. Then, like so many of the survivors, he is worried by reports of night-time looting in deserted L’Aquila.
In a clearing in front of the tents, three clowns are doing a very good job at entertaining the children.
Mascia, mother of a two- and a three-year-old, is grateful for the respite. As the children scream and shout in delight at the clowns, it might seem that the circus has come to town. Maybe it has, but this circus has brought only pain and sorrow, killing 211 and leaving more than 17,000 homeless.