'Many dead' in Italian hotel hit by avalanche

dynamitenews.com
Farindola, Italy/ 19 January 2017.Several people have died after a ski hotel was buried by an avalanche in earthquake-hit central Italy on Thursday. 

"There are many dead," said Antonio Crocetta, the head of a group of Alpine police that was trying to reach the cut-off hotel.

Some dead were found inside the Hotel Rigopiano in the town of Farindola on the Gran Sasso mountain in the province of Pescara in the Abruzzo region.

Sources said there had been at least 20 guests and seven staff at the Hotel Rigopiano on the lower slopes of the Gran Sasso mountain when the first of four powerful quakes hit the region on Wednesday morning.

The rescuers at the hotel were reported to have a snow mobile capable of transporting up to eight people.

Ambulances were blocked by two metres of snow some nine kilometres away, according to the civil protection agency.

Antonio Di Marco, president of the province of Pescara, which includes the mountain village of Farindola, close to where the hotel is located, said two people had been found alive.

"We don't know yet how many people are unaccounted for or dead," he wrote on his Facebook page.

"What is certain is that the building took a direct hit from the avalanche to the point that it was moved by 10 metres."