Children laid to rest after Italian earthquake

A mass funeral has been held in Italy for the victims - most of them children - of Thursday's earthquake.

Some 29 earthquake victims were buried, including the teacher and 26 children who were crushed when the school in an Italian village collapsed.

The earthquake, on Thursday, heavily hit San Giuliano di Puglia, a village of fewer than 1,200 people in south-central Italy.

Mourners applauded when Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and his wife, Franca, who was fighting back tears, arrived for the service, under a tent at the outskirts of this now-evacuated town.

The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Pier Ferdinando Casini, embraced the town’s mayor, whose daughter was among the nine six-year-old – an entire class - who perished, along with 17 schoolfriends.

A moment of silence followed.

A little boy tried to push his way through a line of policemen to reach a child’s coffin, one of a long row of white coffins.

Photos of smiling children were placed on the coffins, surrounded by a thicket of white flowers.

Authorities have launched a criminal investigation, and have questioned why the 49-year-old school was practically the only structure to completely collapse in the 5.4-magnitude tremor.

A quake of such intensity is not usually strong enough to knock down a building which has been built or reinforced to meet modern earthquake standards.

Nunziatina Porrazzo, whose eight-year-old son was killed, said: “I am Luigi’s mamma. I’m the mother of all the angels of San Giuliano di Puglia.”

Then to applause at the end of the ceremony she appealed to politicians: “I ask that all schools be made safe. I don’t want any mamma or daddy to ever weep for their children as the parents of this town have.”

Bishop Tommaso Valentinetti, from the nearby Adriatic town of Termoli, which was also damaged in the quake, also appealed to authorities.

“Help us to be vigilant so these tragedies don’t happen, to prevent such a terrible experience from happening again,” he said.

At the altar, the bishop read off all the names of the victims, starting with the teacher, then the children, then the elderly women who were killed in their damaged homes: “Carmela, Maria Celeste, Luca, Paolo, Luigi, Costanza, Michaela, Antonio, Maria, Luigi, Melissa, Luca, Gianmaria, Domenico, Giovanna, Gianni, Lorenza, Martina, Valentina, Maria, Raffaele, Antonio, Antonella, Valentina, Morena, Giovanna, Sergio, Annantonia and Luisa.”

The bishop said the mourners were confronting the “mystery of death” and added: “We want to be aware of all our fragility and our finality.”

At the Vatican, Pope John Paul II told pilgrims in St Peter’s Square that he wanted again to express his ”fatherly closeness, entrusting in the hands of God who is in the heavens the young lives of those who have left us, and imploring the comfort of Christian faith and hope.”

Policemen, firefighters, soldiers and paramedics carried the coffins up a winding, dirt road to the cemetery. Relatives of the dead followed on foot, weeping and clinging to each other.

Stuffed toy animals, dolls and sports trophies were nestled among the flowers covering the coffins.

The 26 white caskets containing the children’s remains were followed by the three, brown mahogany ones of the adult victims.

The tent was set up next to the town’s sports centre, which had been used as a makeshift morgue as body after body was extracted from under the slabs of concrete crushing the victims.

Many surviving children suffered fractured arms and legs and severe chest injuries.

Some 140 people from the region who were injured in the quake are still in hospital.

Investigating magistrates who inspected the site yesterday said they would look into whether manslaughter or negligence charges were warranted.

“It’s an anomalous situation, the collapse of an entire building,” prosecutor Andrea Cataldi Tassone said at the scene. “So we must determine if there is possible responsibility.”

He and other prosecutors stressed that no one was under investigation and that there was no information yet pointing to anyone responsible.

Italian news reports said Saturday that a second story had been added to the original structure in recent years.

Questions also mounted Saturday about why the entire region – about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Naples – hadn’t been declared a quake-prone zone, particularly after a 1980 quake in the Naples area killed 2,570 people and left 30,000 homeless.

Such a designation would have required stiffer building codes in a part of Italy where illegal, substandard construction is widespread.

The engineer who designed the school renovations, Giuseppe La Serra, 48, told the ANSA news agency yesterday that he added two classrooms – not an entire story – on to the structure and that the renovations conformed to regulations. He denied reports that heavy cement had been used.

Had the building been zoned as a quake-prone area, the renovations would have been carried out to a higher standard, he said.

“I think about these children who died, I think continuously and I haven’t slept for days,” La Serra was quoted as saying.

“But I repeat, my conscience is clear and I would have wanted to be there with the firemen to dig.”

A score of towns and villages in the Molise and Puglia regions were rattled by the quake and subsequent aftershocks.

Authorities ordered a total of 5,500 people evacuated, and nearly 3,000 people were living in tents or trailers.

Authorities said they hoped to soon find warmer bungalows for those whose homes were left unstable or heavily damaged.

Residents forced to take shelter in blue tents – heated by portable radiators - were aching to return home, even as several aftershocks continued through today.

“We’ve seen these scenes on television, and now we find ourselves in a tent camp,” an unshaven Giuseppe Iacurto said yesterday as he walked with his 10-year-old son, Paolo, one of the first to be pulled out of the school.

Amid confusion over the final toll, the school’s principal, Giuseppe Colombo, confirmed yesterday that all nine students in the first grade had died, wiping out the village’s six-year-olds.

“Our job now is to make sure that those who survived are not traumatised by their memory of those who died,” Colombo said.

Asked if the school would be re-built on the same site, he said: “We have to choose another place and cancel the memory of this place completely.”