Italy held a state funeral yesterday for 281 victims of its worst earthquake in three decades and will now turn its thoughts to rebuilding the lives of the thousands made homeless.
On a national day of mourning, about 200 coffins were laid out on the parade ground of a police academy in the mountain city of L’Aquila for the funeral at 11am. About 1,600 bereaved relatives were expected to attend.
“I’ll be there,” said 30-year-old Angelo Dania, whose house was destroyed by the 6.3 magnitude quake that hit the central Italian region of Abruzzo early on Monday as residents slept.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“I am worried about my house, but, in the end, I am the lucky one,” he said. “I could have been one of them.”
Rescue efforts were drawing to an end as hopes of pulling any more survivors from the rubble faded.
“The search is almost over,” said Luca Spoletini, spokesman of the Civil Protection agency, which is coordinating Italy’s response to the emergency.
But one fireman said: “As long as we know there are people under the rubble we’ll keep searching, even if we’re sure they’re dead. Families need to know what happened to their loved ones.”
Rescue work continued to be hampered by violent aftershocks on Thursday, which further damaged buildings in the medieval towns and terrified the 17,000 people living in tent villages.
Thousands more survivors are being put up in hotels or relatives’ homes.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called L’Aquila a “ghost town” and said reconstruction would cost billions. He plans to attend the state funeral, where Catholic mass will be led by the Vatican’s second-highest priest, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
The funeral required a special dispensation because mass is not usually celebrated on Good Friday in the Catholic church. Pope Benedict has said he will visit Abruzzo soon.
There will also be an Islamic rite funeral for six Muslim victims.
After the funeral, survivors will start thinking about how to pick up their lives in a region that relies on tourism, farming and family firms. Italy’s industry minister said more than half of the companies in Abruzzo “are no longer producing.”
One estimate put the damage at up to 3 billion euros (US$4 billion), though its impact on Italy’s nearly 2 trillion euro economy, already mired in recession, is expected to be limited.
The government plans to suspend some tax, utility and phone bills in the affected areas and has earmarked 100 million euros for rescue, relief and reconstruction efforts. Italian banks may also suspend mortgage payments and bank charges for survivors.
Local builders, rejecting suggestions that shoddy building was to blame for the collapse of modern buildings that should have been earthquake-proof, including a hospital and student hostel, said some of the damage would prove to be superficial.
Locals were mystified as to why some houses were flattened while neighboring ones of the same period survived, or why the village of Onna was almost entirely destroyed, and its tiny population decimated, but Monticchio next door was untouched.
“It’s as if the earthquake tried to avoid us,” 45-year-old Amedeo Nardicchio said in Monticchio. “We were lucky.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS