Italy Rigopiano avalanche: Dozens missing under snow and rubble

Rescuers have removed three bodies from a hotel engulfed by an avalanche in central Italy as a desperate search for up to 35 other people continues.

Heavy snow and disruption caused by multiple earthquakes have hindered rescue efforts in the rubble of the Rigopiano hotel, in the Abruzzo region.

Rescuers say they have heard nothing in the rubble while sniffer
dogs are reportedly unable to locate victims.

Two people who were outside the hotel at the time of the avalanche survived.

Four earthquakes above magnitude 5 rocked central Italy on Wednesday, with tremors continuing into the night.

The quakes compounded problems resulting from snow and freezing weather, with power lines brought down and villages temporarily cut off.

Rescue operations are under way across central Italy and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said the EU is ready to help.

"Heartfelt condolences to those who lost loved ones in #Italy," he wrote in a tweet, in English and Italian. "Europe is ready to help.

Siamo tutti vicini all'Italia [We are all Italy's neighbours]."

It appears the guests had gathered on the ground floor of the four-star spa hotel, close to the Gran Sasso mountain, to a wait evacuation following the earthquakes.

Twenty guests and seven staff were registered as being at the hotel, among them children, but rescuers say the actual number could be 35.

The avalanche struck some time between 16:30 (15:30 GMT) and 17:40, when the first known appeal for help was made.

It partially brought down the roof and, according to some reports, shifted the building 10m (11 yards) off its foundations.

A guest who was outside the building at the time raised the alarm with his phone.

Giampiero Parete, whose wife and two children are missing, said he had gone to get something from his car: "I was covered by the snow but I managed to get out. The car was not subjected and I waited for the rescuers to arrive."

A couple was quoted as telling rescuers in a message, "Help, we're dying of cold."

Mr Parete, who was taken to hospital with a fellow survivor, continued to make phone calls but it reportedly took until 20:00 before his pleas were acted on by the authorities.

Names have been published in the Italian media. A list of 23 names given by La Stampa newspaper suggests that most are Italians but they include a Swiss national and a Romanian.

Three are children aged six, seven and nine, and the oldest person on the list is a man of 60.

Seven of the missing are from the neighbouring region of Marche.

A couple from Marche who are not recorded in La Stampa's list, Marco Vagnarelli and Paola Tomassini, were last heard from at 16:30 on Wednesday, when Marco contacted his brother Fulvio on WhatsApp, Ansa reports. The avalanche had still not started at that point.

Marco told his brother that their departure from the area was being delayed by the bad weather.

Video shows hotel interiors choked with walls of debris and snow.

"The hotel is almost completely destroyed," Antonio Crocetta, a member of the Alpine rescue squad who was at the scene, told Reuters news agency by phone.

"We've called out but we've heard no replies, no voices. We're digging and looking for people."

The first rescuers only reached the hotel on skis at 04:30 on Thursday morning. A line of rescue vehicles snaked along an approach road as they waited for it to be cleared.

Italian media say three bodies have been extracted while, according to an unconfirmed report, a fourth body has been found inside but not yet recovered.

The head of the civil protection agency, Fabrizio Curcio, said at times of heavy snowfall, they advise people to stay inside but in areas affected by earthquakes, people should leave their homes.

Putting together the two, he said, was extremely complicated.

Wednesday's quakes came after the regions of Abruzzo, March and Lazio were hit by days of heavy snow.

One person in the area died on Wednesday and another was reported missing.

The same region was hit by an earthquake on 24 August, when 298 people died.

Another earthquake in October killed no-one, as most of the population centres had been evacuated.

Since then, the region has been hit by cold weather and snowstorms.

The Apennines region saw three magnitude-6 tremors between August and October. A succession of quakes like this is often how the geology works.

The big picture is reasonably well understood. Wider technical forces in the Earth's crust have led to the Apennines being pulled apart at a rate of roughly 3mm per year - about a 10th of the speed at which your fingernails grow.

But this stress is then spread across a multitude of different faults that cut through the mountains. And this network is fiendishly complicated.

It does now look as though August's event broke two neighbouring faults, starting on one known as the Laga and then jumping across to one called the Vettore.

Then came October with a swathe of quakes that broke the rest of the Vetorre. But the stress, according to the seismologists, wasn't just sent north, it was loaded south as well - south of August's event.

And it's in this zone that we have now seen a series of quakes in recent days. About a dozen magnitude fours and fives.