Saudi- Italy avalanche: 8 survivors found in rubble of hotel

(MENAFN- Arab News) PENNE: Two young children were among eight people pulled alive Friday from the ruins of an Italian mountain hotel, nearly two days after it was buried under a devastating avalanche.
The rescues raised hopes of finding more survivors with efforts under way to locate between 17 and 24 others thought to have been in the hotel when the avalanche struck on Wednesday afternoon.
Evacuated by helicopter, the rescued survivors were taken to hospitals in the cities of Pescara and Aquila. Some were being treated for hypothermia but no-one was in a serious condition, officials said.
They were pulled out after more than 40 hours under the snow-covered rubble of the Hotel Rigopiano, a three-story spa hotel on the eastern lower slops of Monte Gran Sasso, the highest peak in central Italy.
Marco Bini, an officer with the mountain rescue wing of the GDF financial police, told AFP the survivors seemed to have been able to light fires to keep themselves warm as temperatures plummeted at 1,200 meters altitude.
'We saw smoke, there were a few small fires in the rubble, and where there is fire there is air so we started to dig.'
He said six people had been found together in an air pocket, including a mother and child. 'They were all in reasonable health, if very cold.'
'The fire will have been using up the oxygen so we were lucky to find them.'
More than 25 people, including several children, were thought to have been in the hotel when it was hit by a massive wall of snow.
Revised estimates on Friday suggested the total could be as high as 34, among them 20 to 22 guests, seven or eight staff members and an unknown number of casual visitors to the four-star hotel.
Scores of mountain police, firefighters and other emergency personnel were deployed at the hotel.
Parete, a 38-year-old chef, told the rescuers that his wife, son and daughter were in the hotel.
'We were ready to leave at 2:00 pm. We were in the foyer with our bags, we had paid the bill and were waiting for a snowplow to clear the road,' he reporters after treatment for hypothermia.
'My wife told me she had a headache so I went to the car to get some pills for her.
'As soon as I got out I felt this wind and then this deafening noise of trees cracking, trunks cascading down the hillside.
'Then the hotel collapsed under this enormous wave of snow and half the mountain. My car was the only thing that escaped, by a few centimeters.'
The avalanche followed four earthquakes of more than five magnitude in the space of four hours earlier on Wednesday.
The national civil protection agency confirmed two more deaths as a result of the quake, taking the total to five, including the two at the hotel.