Daily Times

PENNE: Rescuers on Friday found six people alive in an Italian mountain hotel that was engulfed in a devastating avalanche two days earlier, and hopes rose that more survivors could be found.

Helicopters were taking five of the survivors, including one young girl and a woman thought to be her mother, to hospital in Pescara for emergency treatment for hypothermia, officials said. They were pulled out after more than 40 hours under the snow-covered rubble of the Hotel Rigopiano, a three-storey spa hotel on the eastern lower slops of Monte Gran Sasso, the highest peak in central Italy.

There were unconfirmed reports that two more survivors had been found. Footage filmed on rescuers’ helmet cameras and broadcast by Italian TV showed some of the rooms inside the hotel as being virtually intact, raising hopes of more survivors. Federica Chiavaroli, a junior minister at the justice ministry, confirmed the dramatic development to reporters in the nearby town of Penne, where the rescue effort was being coordinated and some relatives were anxiously awaiting news of missing loved ones.

“Six people have been found alive and they are being pulled out,” the minister told AFP. 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.

Updated estimates on Friday suggested the total could be as high as 34 — 20 to 22 guests, seven or eight staff members and an unknown number of casual visitors to the four-star, three-storey hotel. Two bodies have been removed from the ruins since the first rescuers reached the hotel in the early hours of Thursday.