The Chaos of Digging Out

By John Nielsen

Along with confusion, the baby sellers and black marketeers

A young police captain led a convoy of buses into the mountainside hamlet of Calitri, 65 miles east of Naples, one day last week. The captain's mission: to persuade the 3,400 villagers of Calitri, camped beside the wreckage of their homes after the country's most devastating earthquake in 65 years, to accept temporary shelter elsewhere. His convoy was part of Plan S, a vast effort by the Italian government to evacuate the 234,000 people left homeless by the quake.

Thousands of rooms in hotels along the Amalfi coast from Naples to Salerno had been requisitioned for the survivors. But the townsfolk of Calitri remained unimpressed. They listened politely to the captain's arguments. Then an old man replied, "You are a good and capable man, but don't come here again. It would be better for your sake. This is where we live, and this is where we want to die." The buses departed empty.

So it went throughout the quake zone last week, as Italy began the awesome, chaotic process of digging out. Few among the living wanted to leave the sites of death and destruction. Barely 1,000 people took advantage of Plan S. Many preferred to join relatives abroad--they flew out of Rome and Naples at a rate of 200 a day--but the vast majority simply stayed put. Deeply suspicious of the central government, they clung to the shattered remnants of their old lives, enduring privation, disease and wet, bitter weather that turned their devastated villages into muddy swamps. "What the people in Rome and Naples seem to have forgotten is that we are all farmers here," explained Felice Imbriani, mayor of Conza della Campania, some 60 miles east of Naples. "What we need are trailers for ourselves and somewhere to store the hay and animals from our destroyed barns. We are determined to stay through the winter."

The Communists continued to criticize the government's relief efforts as inadequate. Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani conceded that there have been "gaps of various kinds." But he insisted that the government has done "everything that is humanly and institutionally possible." Still, by midweek the government had all but abandoned Plan S, though not without claiming a moral victory. "The constant flow of food, clothes, tents and campers [into the affected area] has raised people's hopes," said Giuseppe Zamberletti, who heads the government relief operation. "A massive evacuation would have been more likely to take place had we failed to bring adequate help." With that, the government moved thousands of campers, trailers and even some railroad cars into the stricken region. By week's end some 12,000 homeless victims of the earthquake had been transferred from tents to more substantial dwellings--including, for a lucky few, prefabricated houses.

The flood of relief supplies seemed to swamp the government's ability to distribute them. Because of corruption, inefficiency and a confusing welter of freelance relief missions, too many well-meant efforts were wasted. Piles of clothing lay abandoned in fields; food rotted in delivery trucks. Faced with a brutal winter and a capricious food supply, many refugees began hoarding. In one suddenly popular scam, children would stand beside collapsed houses and flag down passing vehicles, begging for food. The resulting haul would then be stashed away by their parents, who remained hidden from view.

Given the confusion in the quake zone, serious crimes were inevitable. Looting became so widespread last week that police were forced to cordon off entire villages to keep out sciacalli (jackals), as the petty thieves who prey on the victims are called. Orphaned infants were stolen from area hospitals, either by childless couples or unscrupulous traffickers who hoped to sell the babies for profit. Racketeers in jacked relief shipments. In fact, police in the village of Nocera, 25 miles from Naples, were forced to break up a gun fight last week between rival factions of the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia. The gunmen were fighting over plunder from the catastrophe.

Meantime, an estimated $3 billion-plus in aid began to pour in from around the world. The European Community ear marked $1.35 billion to help rebuild the devastated region. The Australian government pledged to match every dollar collected from its citizens for earthquake relief. Iceland sent along $10 million. The U.S. Congress approved a special appropriation of $50 million in aid to the victims; about $10 million would be used for immediate relief, the remainder to finance long-term reconstruction. The gesture was, in the words of U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Frank Church, "an expression of love from one country to another."

Love may become an indispensable commodity in the difficult months ahead. Relief teams were still recovering survivors in the debris last week, and the tens of thousands of tent people managed to turn out plates of steaming pasta on make shift stoves. But typhoid fever and hepatitis have already appeared in a number of villages, and the incidence seems likely to rise, despite an inoculation program.

Worse, the gathering winter almost certainly will take its toll among the refugees, long before the government can improve their lot. "The army lives in terror of still being in the area when the home less start dying of cold and exposure," said a leading Christian Democrat. "When that time comes, there will be angry confrontations."

-- By John Nielsen. Reported by Roland Flamini/Naples

With reporting by Roland Flamini

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