A powerful earthquake that struck central Italy early Monday caused catastrophic damage at the University of L’Aquila, possibly killing one student and leaving more than half a dozen others trapped in the rubble of a collapsed dormitory.
“There is an absolute need for help,” Ferdinando di Orio, the university’s rector, told Italy’s Adnkronos news agency. “The university is practically destroyed. The structures are all gravely damaged, and we don’t have anyplace to transfer our 27,000 students.”
The 6.3-magnitude earthquake, which struck at 3:32 a.m. local time on Monday and was Italy’s worst in nearly three decades, had its epicenter in the central Italian region of Abruzzo. L’Aquila, the capital of region, is about 70 miles northeast of Rome.
A university dormitory called the Casa dello Studente collapsed, with some news reports saying one student was dead and at least seven others were still trapped inside Monday night. The building, constructed in 1965, housed 140 students. Some had already gone home for Easter break, but as many as 80 were still inside at the time of the quake, another Italian news agency, ANSA, reported.
Rescue workers picking through the rubble managed to free six survivors around 6 p.m. and were still trying to reach others.
“We can’t explain how a relatively young building like the Casa dello Studente can have been so struck,” Giannino Di Tommaso, president of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, told Adnkronos. “The area around L’Aquila is highly seismic, and among other things, the building was built on a ridge.”
The Conference of Italian University Rectors announced the establishment of an Earthquake Emergency University Fund and appealed to faculty members and administrative personnel at institutions across the country to donate money for the reconstruction of buildings at L’Aquila.
Other institutions were mobilizing to assist with recovery efforts. The University of Trento, in northern Italy, was sending a team of engineers with skills appropriate to the emergency, according to the Italian Network Web site.
The university’s plight is part of a disaster that caused major damage in the region, leaving at least 150 people dead, 1,500 injured, and tens of thousands homeless.
Gioacchino Giuliani, a seismologist at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, had predicted a major earthquake late last month, based on his measurements of radon gas emissions in the area. His predictions were dismissed by government authorities, who accused him of “spreading alarm” and forced him to take the statements off the Internet.
“These imbeciles enjoy spreading false news,” the head of Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, Guido Bertolaso, said last week, according to Time magazine. “Everyone knows that you can’t predict earthquakes.”
