Rigopiano, 5 years ago the tragedy

Those were the days of the great snow emergency and all of Abruzzo suffered from the discomforts of isolation. In the region, already devastated by bad weather, three earthquakes of significant magnitude occurred on the morning of 18 January 2017. Inside the Rigopiano hotel in the municipality of Farindola (Pescara) at that time there were 40 people (28 guests, including four children, and 12 employees), who were ‘imprisoned’, after the heavy snow had blocked the road that connected the refuge with the valley floor: despite the appeals, in fact, it was not possible to find a snow blower to clear the path. Probably due to the tremors, which were followed by a series of reruns in the afternoon, around 5 pm a block of snow and debris broke off the mountain behind the resort, a modern structure, built at an altitude of 1,200 meters on the Pescara side of the Gran Stone. The hotel was completely overwhelmed: the avalanche broke through the walls and moved it about ten meters towards the valley. The toll was very heavy: 29 dead and 11 survivors, miraculously survived, after spending hours and hours in the rubble of the hotel overwhelmed by the 1,200-ton avalanche which, cutting down the mountain and dragging away hundreds of trees, fell on the structure. The alarm was raised, almost live, by the chef Giampiero Parete who, locked in the car outside the hall, saw the avalanche hit the hotel and managed to notify his employer Quintino Marcella over the phone. In the hotel there were also Parete’s wife and two children, who will later be among the 11 survivors. Marcella got on the phone to call for help, but for a long, too long time nobody wanted to believe her words: the rescue column only left between 19:30 and 20:00 and it took hours to reach the hotel. The first survivors were found only after 30 hours, while it took 62 hours to extract alive the last of the 11 survivors of a tragedy for which the responsibility has yet to be ascertained. The mother of a victim: “For us that day everything is is stopped “” We are worse every day, we are stopped at January 18, 2017 “. Mariangela Di Giorgio is the mother of Ilaria Di Biase, from Archi (Chieti), who was killed at the age of 22 by the avalanche that destroyed and buried the Hotel Rigopiano. “She was the youngest of the staff – her mother reminds Adnkronos – She was a cook. She had also received job offers from abroad, but she had refused them. To be close to us, her family and her boyfriend. She was small. Ilaria … – she says crying -. Her dream was to be a pastry chef. Dreams buried under meters of snow and ice, forever. “The day before the disaster she would have to go home, with her new Opel Corsa. paying in installments, but was blocked by snow. “‘The road is impassable’, he told me on the morning of the drama on the phone. ‘We are waiting for the turbine'”. But the turbine never came. “And they were all trapped in that place. They didn’t do anything to save them and they didn’t even try. Five years later the pain is the same. I always hope – continues the woman – that it’s just a nightmare and that Ilaria, at any moment, open the door to go home, showing off one of your wonderful smiles “. “At every party – he continues – we go among the rubble, to leave her some flowers. We go to her birthday, at Christmas, always … For us, everything has stopped, that infernal day. Even as regards justice, everything is still. process is in its initial phase, endless delays; the experts take and waste time, perhaps to get to the limitation. We have also involved Anmil, because Ilaria is also a victim of work. We do not know if we still believe in this justice “. “After 5 years of long and tiring waiting, we hope that 2022 is the year that brings the justice you deserve, innocent souls, and that we family members ask for you. It will have to be a good year, because the vessel is truly full and can no longer accept any excuse and any lengthening of the times “. Thus the relatives of the victims of Rigopiano. Today, as always, there will be a torchlight procession and mass but the relatives of the victims are disappointed and angry about a trial, with 30 defendants, which is still in the preliminary phase. The disputed crimes range, for various reasons, from the collapse of buildings or other negligent disasters, to murder and negligent injury, to abuse of office and to false ideology.