The bursting of a gas pipe also affected other buildings
Three dead, you are missing, 50 displaced, four collapsed buildings it’s a forty condominiums involved. A roar broke the silence of Ravanusa Saturday around 20.30. In the Agrigento town of over 10 thousand inhabitants, 50 minutes by car from the capital and more than two hours from Palermo, people took to the street terrified. “A bomb, a bomb“they shouted.
“It looked like an atomic bomb“, a survivor of theAdnKronos. Then with word of mouth and with chat from Whatsapp they figured out where it happened bursting of a gas pipeline which triggered the explosion: in via Trilussa where four buildings collapsed. It immediately flared up a fire. The alarms of cars and some houses have begun to sound.
Rubble, pieces of frame, furniture, doors were thrown tens of meters from the site of the explosion. The area was filled with hundreds of people: “Mamma mia, mamma mia, a disaster” they exclaim. The mayor of Ravanusa, Carmelo D’Angelo appealed with a video on Facebook: “There has been a disaster whoever has tank trucks and mechanical means give us a hand. Whoever has shovels and bulldozers come to help”. And then he invited his fellow citizens to stay in their homes to “allow rescuers to intervene in safety and tranquility”.
THE rescuers are still hard at work digging through the rubble after the various fires that developed as a result of the explosion, probably caused by a leak in the pipeline and possibly triggered by an elevator, were extinguished during the night. In fact, the first Fire Brigade teams arrived found a large loss of methane.
The canine units and the Usar experts, firefighters specialists in research under the rubble, from Messina, Catania and Palermo are also at work. At least fifty people evacuated from their homes were hosted by friends or relatives while the ‘base of operations’ was set up in a school. In the meantime, an investigation has already begun, announced by the public prosecutor of Agrigento, Luigi Patronaggio. The mayor, who wanted to deny the rumors that there were children among the missing, excluded that in the previous days there had been requests or reports of problems in the area affected by the explosion.
Ravanusa, the prefecture: you are missing, all in the same building
According to what the head of the cabinet of the Agrigento police headquarters has made known Elisa Vaccaro, four of the six missing from the explosion in Ravanusa they lived in the same collapsed building while two others, including the 30-year-old pregnant nurse, were gone to find relatives.
Rescue operations are still ongoing. “The commitment of the firefighters does not stop and will not stop – says the head of the national body Guido Parisi – Until the end we will try to extract the people involved in the collapses alive”. Parisi then underlined that at the moment there are about a hundred firefighters working on the rubble, among which there are several Usar teams, specialists in research in complex contexts.
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