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Rubble from damaged property covers a street following an earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, destroying small mountain towns and burying victims in the rubble of collapsed buildings. Photo: Bloomberg

New | Crucial fault line runs up spine of quake-prone Italy

An earthquake devastating villages in central Italy Wednesday triggered along a fault line that has tormented the Italian peninsula for centuries, making the country among the most quake-prone regions of Europe.

The magnitude 6.2 quake, which left at least 73 people dead, occurred squarely within a band of “high seismic hazard” running along the axis of the north-south Apennines mountain range, according to the US Geological Survey.

Architecture is centuries old in the region, placing it at even higher risk of damage and deaths.

“Many of the towns feature stone construction including a deep history of architecture dating back to Roman and in some cases Etruscan times,” the US Geological Survey said in a statement.

A damaged house is pictured in the central Italian village of Amatrice, after a powerful earthquake rocked central Italy, leaving at least 73 people dead, dozens more injured or trapped under the rubble and thousands temporarily homeless. Photo: AFP

The event fell squarely between two relatively recent earthquakes along the same fault line. Thirty miles northwest of there back in 1997, a magnitude 6.0 quake left 11 dead and destroyed 80,000 homes in the Marche and Umbria regions of Italy.

In 2009, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake levelled the village of L’Aquila, leaving 295 dead, 1,000 injured and 55,000 homeless. The village is 20 miles to the southeast of Wednesday’s destruction.

“There’s a lot of geological things going on in that particular part of Europe,” said Robert Sanders, a US Geological Survey geophysicist.

He said the area marks a collision between Africa and Eurasia tectonic plates with a fault line that crosses Sicily before running along the spine of the Italian boot.

While the geological conditions make Italy and Greece most at risk for earthquakes in Europe, those countries pale in comparison to other quake-stricken regions, particularly the Pacific Rim where nations such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan and Chile are at high risk of very strong quakes, Sanders said.

A rescue worker walks with his dog as they search for survivors following an earthquake in Amatrice, Italy. Photo: Bloomberg

Apart from the size of an earthquake, a multitude of factors prove why one can to be more damaging and lethal than another.

“Building structure has a lot to do with damage we’ll see,” Sanders said. “For example, Chile has very high, very strict building codes because they’re so earthquake-prone and they get some of the largest earthquakes in the world. So (for) a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in Chile, we wouldn’t expect to see damage on this scale that we’re seeing in Italy.”

Many of the ancient homes of Italy are without protective retrofitting, he said, and the quake occurred in the pre-dawn hours when most of the residents were asleep in their bedrooms.

“That’s why we’re seeing a lot of these devastating pictures and videos coming in from some of these towns where entire blocks and buildings are just in rubble,” he said.

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