Desperate hunt for kin in L'aquila

A few firemen clambered up on top of the rubble and began picking up pieces with their hands, but the digging ended as abruptly as it started. "Those in there are dead for sure," one fireman said before moving on to another crumbling house nearby, Vicentini said.

"They left saying they had worse things to attend to," said the 33-year-old, one of several locals left staring helplessly at the little left of their houses and relatives trapped inside. "They said they needed bulldozers, and it would have been dangerous to dig in these conditions," told Reuters news agency.

Clara, wearing a jacket thrown over pink pajamas, was shaking despite the warm air. After the tremor "we wanted to go into the apartment to grab a few things but everything was destroyed," Agence France-Presse quoted her as saying. "What saved us was a huge dresser in our bedroom that helped keep the wall standing."

Residents in shock

Hundreds of people, some in shock waited outside L'Aquila's main hospital for treatment, the ANSA news agency reported earlier. Doctors treated people in the open air as only one operating room was functioning, the agency said. Some 15,000 people suffered a power outage and part of the highway linking L'Aquila to Rome was closed.

An Italian scientist predicted the earthquake around L'Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic among the population. Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor's anger. Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for "spreading alarm" and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.

Meanwhile, scientists also said the killer earthquake occurred in a notorious trouble spot and warned further powerful shocks in the coming months could not be ruled out. Roger Musson of the British Geological Survey, or BGS in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the Apennines were a hotspot for large quakes, and an event of this magnitude is not really a surprise. "We have this in-built psychological sense that this Earth on which we stand is fixed and immobile, then an earthquake comes along and shatters the illusion," he observed.