Death in the Mezzogiorno

By John Nielsen

A killer earthquake ravages a mournful land

The muffled cries continued through the night. "I am Giuseppe Martiello. My wife is down here too. We are trapped. Giuseppe Martiello . . . Giuseppe Martiello . . ." But no one came. By morning the voice was still.

The tragedy began with a single vicious convulsion that rocked Italy from the tip of the southern Mezzogiorno to the Alps. At first the destruction seemed manageable, but then, slowly, the awful magnitude of the catastrophe began to emerge. Scores of communities had been leveled across 10,000 sq. mi. of the rugged southern countryside. Whole villages were obliterated. Uncounted thousands were buried in the wreckage of their homes, churches and cafes. Delayed by impassable roads, bad weather and bureaucratic ineptitude, rescue workers took 48 hours or more to reach the most isolated hamlets. Finally the digging-out gathered momentum, unearthing the battered corpses with sickening regularity. By week's end the official death toll stood at nearly 3,000--a fraction, it was feared, of the actual total. More frightening still was the realization that a dread dimension of human failure had been added to an accident of nature: many who died of shock and exposure might have lived had help reached them more quickly.

It was Italy's worst earthquake in 65 years. The first shock, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, hit in the early evening as most of the country was sitting down to Sunday supper. Thirty-three smaller tremors followed during the night, ranging in intensity from 3.5 to 4.5 (see SCIENCE). From its epicenter at Eboli, near Salerno, the terremoto radiated its destruction through the regions of Campania and Basilicata, a rugged belt of parsimonious countryside between the Apennines and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the ankle of the Italian boot. Though it struck the major cities in its path, the quake concentrated with cruel efficiency on impoverished rural villages. In all, 179 communities suffered at least some damage, and 310,000 people were made homeless. General Antonio Tamburino, military commander of the relief forces in Avellino, one of the hardest-hit provinces, ventured that the dead might number 10,000 or more before the last of the debris was cleared.

Despite a history of seismic activity in the region,* the authorities proved to be tragically unprepared. There were no disaster contingency plans and few resources for rapidly deploying rescue teams to the mountain hamlets. The necessary soldiers, firemen, medical supplies and heavy equipment had to be trucked in from military bases hundreds of miles to the north. "Beyond question, there have been serious official shortcomings," President Sandro Pertini charged during a grim, surprisingly outspoken address on television at midweek. "Those guilty of these failures must be made to pay."

Though Pertini's office is largely ceremonial, his remarks very nearly brought down the government. Interior Minister Virginio Rognoni, under heavy political fire over the botched relief effort, abruptly tried to resign from the month-old coalition Cabinet of Christian Democratic Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani. Forlani rejected the resignation and urged Rognoni to stay on the job, arguing that the last thing that was needed during the earthquake emergency was political controversy. But even the Communists soon got in the act. Fuming against what he called "the inexcusable lack of action by the authorities," Communist Party Chief Enrico Berlinguer proposed the creation of a new, Communist-led coalition government. The Christian Democrats, who have ruled Italy without interruption for more than 30 years, were hardly likely to step aside, but the relief scandal had clearly weakened the Forlani Cabinet's grip on power.

The fact was that the central government had not recognized the full extent of the devastation until more than 36 hours after the first tremors. Early reports told of scattered destruction in the cities: a nine-story building collapsed in Naples, killing 52 occupants; damage to police headquarters in Salerno claimed the lives of two officers; five people died in Potenza, two of them when a stone frieze fell from the fac,ade of the city hall. And everywhere, terrified southerners fled their homes for the relative safety of the open air. Whole families took to sleeping in their cars in local soccer fields, municipal parks, even at service stations along the Autostrada del Sole (Highway of the Sun), the expressway linking Rome to the south. They were lucky.

Gradually it became clear that the worst damage had occurred in the countryside. "Most of the quake's victims died in the remote villages that cling to the hilltops along narrow, hard-to-reach valleys," reported TIME'S Erik Amfitheatrof after touring the region in a helicopter. "Many were buried alive when the close-packed walls of their houses pushed each other down, one after the other. There was no escape in the narrow, winding village streets." With most of the rural phone lines down, reports from the outlying areas did not begin filtering in until the next morning. They suggested an unimaginable scale of destruction. Just 60 miles east of Naples, for example, the village of Conza della Campania lost 80% of its 2,500 inhabitants. Only three buildings were left intact in Laviano, a hilltop hamlet dating back to Norman times, and a third of the 3,000 villagers were missing. Neighboring Castelnuovo di Conza was completely destroyed; authorities simply had no idea how many people were buried in its ruins.

The largest group of victims was found in the rubble of the 15th century Church of Santa Maria Assunta at Balvano. Three hundred parishioners, mostly mothers and children receiving instructions for their First Communion, were attending evening Mass when the marble floor began to heave and the heavy candlesticks to wobble on the main altar. "It was as though a giant passing train had shaken the building to its foundations," recalled Father Giuseppe Pagliuca, the parish priest. As the terrified congregation fled toward the doors, the huge roof split in two and collapsed, throwing Pagliuca clear but burying the worshipers under a mountain of stone. The bleeding figure of a town official landed at the priest's feet. "Lord have mercy on me," the man whispered, and then died.

Touring the stricken region by helicopter on Tuesday, Pope John Paul II visited a hospital and stopped in Balvano to comfort the grieving townspeople. "I come as a brother," the Pontiff said in his quiet, Polish-accented Italian, his white garments stained from embracing grimy survivors. "I want to tell you that you are surrounded by compassion on the part of all Christians."

Across the quake-stricken area, able-bodied survivors dug frantically with their hands in search of husbands, wives, children, parents. By night, they slept in the open, huddled together around hundreds of campfires that dotted the countryside.

In some areas, the telephone company set up special switchboards so that villagers could reach relatives in America and Northern Europe. One man in Balvano called his brother-in-law in West Germany, but did not have the heart to reveal the family tragedy. "You'd better come home because things are not going well for us here," the caller said. The emigrant worker had lost his wife, his four children, his brother and his mother.

International reaction to the tragedy was swift. The U.S. provided six military helicopters and 2,000 tents and pledged an initial $1.5 million to a relief fund, while a welter of private charities set up funds of their own in American cities with large Italian immigrant populations. The European Community appropriated $2 million for disaster relief. Red Cross societies in at least nine countries, including Japan and South Korea, provided funds.

Some of the international assistance was stalled by Italy's infamous bureaucracy. Two Red Cross planes loaded with relief supplies were reportedly forced to wait 24 hours for clearance to enter the country. Local help encountered comparable problems. Some of the first rescue teams arrived little better equipped than the people they were sent to help. Eventually, shortages in the quake zone gave rise to a ghoulish black-market trade in everything from coffins to mineral water. The result was widespread bitterness, as Pertini discovered on Tuesday during an inspection tour of the stricken region. "How dare you stroll through here?" shouted a man digging through the rubble in Laviano as the immaculately dressed presidential party approached. "This is not a spectacle, you shits! My wife is down there. She has been screaming for two days."

The rescue operation finally moved into high gear at midweek, with 33,000 workers deployed throughout the disaster region. Using specially trained German shepherd dogs and directional microphones lowered into cavities in the rubble, they were still rinding survivors in the wreckage. On Friday three people, including a six-month-old infant in Lioni, were rescued after more than five days of entrapment. Earlier, workers sifting through the ruined hospital at Sant' Angelo de' Lombardi found three babies still alive. Among them was Carmencita Antoniello, born prematurely just five days before the quake. She had been trapped in her incubator. In Balvano, 90-year-old Donata Zarillo was rescued after spending 30 hours trapped in the wreckage of her kitchen. "We heard her beating a piece of wood against the wall," explained Fireman Giancarlo Rocchi.

A 26-year-old woman named Liberata (the name, appropriately, means "liberated") was trapped with her mother for 72 hours after their home collapsed. She described the experience in a moving television interview: "We hugged each other helplessly. In the darkness, we tried to scrape away the dirt and make a space in which to breathe. Mother prayed and I heard her say, 'Oh God, let me die an hour before my daughter because I could not stand to see her die.' We spoke of many things, important things. When they pulled us out, I felt my mother's face. It was cold. This told me she was near the end, and I burst into tears." Liberata's mother died seconds after being rescued.

The responsibility--and the credit--for ultimately pulling together the relief effort belonged to Giuseppe Zamberletti, 56, the government's Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Appointed commissioner for the stricken area on Tuesday, Zamberletti set up headquarters in Naples and immediately imposed some badgering generalship on his sprawling forces. By Friday large quantities of food, clothing and medical supplies to prevent the spread of disease were flowing into the major towns, though deliveries to the most isolated villages remained slow. The commissioner also busied himself requisitioning railroad cars and seaside tourist hotels to provide temporary shelter for the homeless. "If people do not need to remain close to their homes, we can move them into resort hotels and holiday camps on the coast," he explained. "Most people dream of a holiday by the sea. Well, at least we can give them that."

Zamberletti brings some experience to the job. In 1976 he supervised rescue operations after an earthquake hit the Friuli region, northeast of Venice. His performance earned him a reputation for getting things done--and a certain fame among ham radio operators under the code name Zorro. But he admits that the success of that effort owed much to foreign assistance, especially from the U.S.

"After Friuli, the Americans did some wonderful things," he says. "They built schools, hospitals. This time the need is much greater. In this present phase of sheltering the homeless, we need 7,000 trailers, or funds to buy them."

By week's end, there was little hope of finding more survivors. Inexorably, piazzas across the region filled with the sad and tidy rows of the victims' coffins, and officials began looking to the size of the recovery task ahead. "We cannot have the world's biggest encampment," said Zamberletti. "We must build entire villages."

But an early winter, bringing incessant rain and freezing cold to the homeless still encamped in the open, had already imposed its own imperatives. "The weather is terrible," declared Vittorio Renzulli, mayor of San Michele di Serino. "We already have several cases of flu, and children are coming down with bronchitis. We still need tents, blankets." And coffins.

By John Nielsen. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof and Roland Flomini/Naples

* Thirteen of Italy's 21 major quakes over the past 100 years have been centered near the west coast between Naples and Cosenza in the south, but the biggest killers of the century struck elsewhere. In 1908 an earthquake killed 75,000 people in Sicily, and 30,000 died during another in the Avezzano area, east of Rome, in 1915.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Roland Flomini

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.