Gas leak in Ravanusa, three dead and six missing: "Hell"

We continue to dig - with bare hands, with molecular dogs, probes and drones - under the rubble to find the missing people buried among the remains of the collapsed buildings in Ravanusa , in the province of Agrigento, gutted by the explosion generated by a gas leak from the pipeline small town.

Four buildings have been destroyed: the death toll for now speaks of three dead - two women and one man -, six missing and only two survivors. Family members take turns waiting for news in front of the crater left by the explosion. There are about a hundred displaced people in the neighborhood, the mayor of Ravanusa has placed them in hotels in neighboring villages.

VICTIMS AND MISSING - Last night, around 20.30, the first roar was heard, the flames broke out and in a few minutes an entire block was blown away: "It was as if a plane had crashed over our house" , said a witness who was in one of the houses adjoining the first collapsed building.

The explosion crumbled a 4-storey building and an adjoining house inhabited by four brothers and their respective families.

On the first floor of the building that had come down lived Rosa Carmina, found alive in the rubble. The second was his sister-in-law: Giuseppa Montana, also a survivor. In the third there were four: Angelo Carmina who is missing, his wife Enza Zagarrio who died, the daughter-in-law, Selene Pagliarello nine months pregnant, and her husband Giuseppe Carmina, son of the couple. Both are missing. On the fourth floor were Calogero Carmina, his wife Gioacchina Minacori, and their son Giuseppe. Minacori is dead the two Carmina are missing. In the other destroyed house lived Pietro Carmina, who is dead, and Carmela Scibetta, who is missing.

THE INVESTIGATION - The magistrates of the Agrigento Public Prosecutor's Office, who carried out an inspection in the morning in the area of the accident - 10,000 square meters placed under seizure - opened a file against unknown persons for manslaughter and culpable disaster and charged a consultant for initial assessments. The first hypothesis is that the gas escaping from a city pipe perhaps following a landslide caused by a landslide or bad weather, has been channeled into the subsoil creating a huge pocket of methane which at the first start, perhaps the start of an elevator , has turned into a deadly bomb. The extent of the explosion makes it impossible to say that the gas leak occurred in an apartment.

Italgas, which yesterday blocked the supply of methane upstream and downstream of the district devastated by the explosion, to avoid further gas leaks, meanwhile made it known that it had checked the pipelines just ten days ago and that it had not found any anomaly. And no anomaly would have been reported by the citizens according to the carabinieri.

(Unioneonline / D)