When the first tremors began in the parched,
rock-ribbed mountains of western Sicily last week, most of the 3,000
people of Salaparuta took refuge on the slopes just below their hilltop
town. There, among their goats and grapevines, they waited in the
chilly night for the danger to pass. At 3 a.m. the earth rolled again,
at first gently, then with a sickening sway. Before their eyes,
Salaparuta crumbled apart like a child's sand castle. Within 30
seconds, the nine-century-old vineyard town was little more than dust.
Left standing over the moonlit rubble was a solitary sentinel, a church
tower, whose bell was jolted by the earth's angry vibrations into a
final eerie death knell. Similar scenes of devastation unfold ed elsewhere in a land that has
long lived with poverty and the Mafia's cruel rule. Unlike Salaparuta,
where all but a few of the villagers had time to flee, scores of people
were crushed to death in cascades of masonry in such neighboring towns
as Montevago, Gibellina, Santa Margherita di Belice, Salemi and Santa
Ninfa. Montevago's lawyer, along with five companions, perished trying
to race the tremors in his tiny Fiat. The town's doctor died on his way
to save his mother. The earthquake was by far Italy's worst since
75,000 people were killed at the other end of tremor-prone Sicily 60
years ago. The toll: as many as 500 people dead, more than 1,000
injured and 80,000 left homeless over a 600-square-mile carpet of
destruction in one of the Mezzogiorno's most backward regions. Aftershocks & Quagmires. The search for victims continued for long,
wearying hours. A seven-year-old girl was pulled out alive after more
than two days in the wreckage of her home —though later she died of
her injuries. The rescue of a 104-year-old woman ended in the same way:
dug out from the debris, she succumbed on the way to a hospital. In
Gibellina, the dead were piled on top of mossy sandstone tombs in the
town cemetery. Much of western Sicily was turned into a giant refugee camp. Hundreds of
thousands of Siciliani nervously slept outdoors even in such relatively
unscathed cities as Palermo, because aftershocks continued to be felt
for days. At the quake's epicenter, the homeless made tents of
tarpaulin, huddled by bonfires, and waited for the government to
distribute food and medicine, much of it contributed by the U.S. and
Britain. Then, as if nature had not already done its worst, violent
rains and winds lashed the quake area at week's end, turning the
refugee encampments into quagmires and halting for a time the delivery
of relief supplies.
