Big aftershock hits battered Italy.4/7/2009 6:30:56 PM A strong aftershock af·ter·shock n. 1. A quake of lesser magnitude, usually one of a series, following a large earthquake in the same area. 2. has struck L'Aquila, a day after 235 people died in a devastating dev·as·tate tr.v. dev·as·tat·ed, dev·as·tat·ing, dev·as·tates 1. To lay waste; destroy. 2. To overwhelm; confound; stun: was devastated by the rude remark. earthquake in the medieval Italian town. Al Jazeera's Nazinine Moshiri, reporting from L'Aquila, said Tuesday's aftershock killed a fireman, who died of a stroke, and brought fear back to the quake-battered town. The 5.6 magnitude aftershock caused two churches to collapse and put historical buildings still standing after Monday's quake at risk. Earlier aftershocks on Tuesday had already impeded rescue efforts in central Italy Central Italy is a geographic area in Italy that encompasses four of the country's 20 autonomous regions:
prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. civil protection officials. More than 1,000 people were injured. Survivors found Rescue workers had earlier celebrated after finding alive a 98-year-old woman who had been trapped for 30 hours and a 20-year-old woman who had been under the rubble of a four-storey building for 42 hours. Maria D'Antuono, the 98-year-old, who was said to be in good condition, told the ANSA ANSA - Advanced Network Systems Architecture news agency that she had whiled away the time by "doing crochet". Rescuers were trying to reach Eleonora Calesini, the 20-year-old who had a leg pinned by a concrete beam Concrete beam A structural member of reinforced concrete placed horizontally to carry loads over openings. Because both bending and shear in such beams induce tensile stresses, steel reinforcing tremendously increases beam strength. and endured nearly two days without water, when Tuesday's big aftershock struck. But a pair of fallen concrete pillars that had created a survival space for the student held, and 90 minutes later, rescuers pulled her conscious from the wreckage. Addressing a news conference in L'Aquila on Tuesday, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister who has declared a state of emergency in the central Abruzzo region, said 150 people had so far been pulled alive from collapsed structures. Saying that the government had deployed 7,000 rescue workers, he said that the search would go on for at least two more days. Cold comfort Survivors of the quake and aftershocks continued to shelter in tents and formed long lines to receive food donations on Tuesday. The civil protection agency said that tens of thousands of people had been made homeless by the magnitude 6.2 quake which damaged 10,000 buildings, levelling many. Thousands of people had spent Monday night in tents, makeshift shelters and cars amid cold and driving rain. Some people took refuge in army barracks bar·rack 1 tr.v. bar·racked, bar·rack·ing, bar·racks To house (soldiers, for example) in quarters. n. 1. A building or group of buildings used to house military personnel. , stadiums and sports centres as temperatures during the night dropped to about four degrees Celsius in the Abruzzo region. The earthquake struck at 3:30am (01:30GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) See UTC. GMT - Universal Time 1 ) on Monday, affecting 26 towns and cities within a 30km radius of L'Aquila, the epicentre epicentre Point on the surface of the Earth that is directly above the source (or focus) of an earthquake. There the effects of the earthquake usually are most severe. See also seismology. . L'Aquila, where most of the dead are, has a population of 68,000 and lies about 100km northeast of Rome, the capital. The neighbouring villages of Villa Sant'Angelo and Borgo di Castelnuovo were almost completely destroyed. Aljazeera.net 2003 - 2009 Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
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