ITALY: Death in the Mezzogiorno

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."