Roundup: Italian avalanche leaves 30 missing in region battered by earthquakes, heavy snow

A massive avalanche apparently triggered by a series of earthquakes one day earlier on Thursday battered an Italian ski resort and left as many as 30 hotel guests and staff members missing.

The region of Abruzzo, east of Rome, has been battered in recent months by three separate sets of intense seismic activities since August last year.

More recently, the region has suffered from record low temperatures and heavy snowfall that cut off phone and electric service to many isolated cities and towns, with lots of roads made impassable by heavy snowdrifts.

Early Thursday, those factors combined when hundreds of tons of snow, ice, and mud from the slopes of the 2,912-meter-tall Gran Sasso became dislodged and crashed down to rip the four-star Hotel Rigopiano from its foundation, pushing the building downhill and burying it beneath tons of snow and debris.

Because of the heavy snowfall and the impacts of the avalanche, ambulances were not able to get closer than 9 kilometers from the hotel, though rescue workers were able to arrive on foot, by snowmobile and with helicopters.

As of late Thursday local time, the authorities recused two survivors, one of whom was treated for frostbite, and found three dead bodies. As many as 30 more, including several children and infants, were unaccounted for.

As night fell, searches began shifting their focus from rescuing survivors to recovering the dead.

Civil protection officials reported late Thursday that only two bodies had been recovered, though some Italian media reports put the number as high as six.

"With the sun setting and temperatures dropping, the worry is that if there are any more survivors, they could risk freezing to death," Giovanni Bianchi from Italy's civil protection squad said in an interview.

With access to the devastated property restricted, searches were slow, employing hand tools and dogs. The search area was large, with some parts of the hotel found hundreds of meters from the remnants of the hotel structure.

A video taken inside part of the structure and shown on Italian television displayed hallways were crammed with snow, ice, mud, and fractured parts of the structure itself, with holiday decorations still hanging from the walls.

Experts said further aftershocks and more avalanches remained a possibility. "This is an extremely complex situation," Titti Postiglione from the emergency department for the region of Abruzzo, said in a brief televised interview.

The Hotel Rigopiano, near the village of Farindola, is only about 150 kilometers from Rome, making it a popular destination for travelers from the Italian capital seeking a short break.

Gilberto Petrucci, an assessor for the nearby town of Penne, said the entire region is suffering.

"We can't take much more; we are on our knees," Petrucci told Xinhua. "Penne has 13,000 residents and we are cut off because the roads are closed."

Schools in the area were closed until at least Monday, and most non-essential businesses also shuttered. Freezing temperatures and more snow are in the forecast for the coming days.

Wednesday's series of earthquakes included at least a dozen temblors measuring more than 5.0 on the Richter scale.

The quakes caused widespread structural damage in Abruzzo and minor damage as faraway as Rome, but before the avalanche there was just one death: a man in his 80s who perished when the roof of his farmhouse collapsed on him. Endit