Deadliest earthquake for almost 30 years leaves 1,500 injured and thousands homeless. There were 12 of them. Four of the bodies were in shiny new coffins. The rest were still in their improvised shrouds – quilts, sheets and even a gaily coloured curtain.

All round the paddock in which the dead had been laid out under a line of trees, there were other signs of the unbearable lightness of modern disaster: a woman in a blush-pink dressing gown who stood at the end of the line of coffins making the sign of the cross as the tears gushed down her cheeks; a man in a souvenir cap advertising Radio 101 who sat on a rock with his head bowed, just a yard or two from the grimly swathed bodies of his neighbours; the woman in the spangled Playboy bunny top who was pleading with her half-delirious, tear-stained friend not to go back into the centre of the village where rescue workers were burrowing in the ruins of what until 3.30am yesterday had been a pretty little village under the snow-capped Apennines.

Onna had about 300 inhabitants. One of the team of undertakers said they had already removed five. And within a half an hour another three corpses had been added to the sad line in the paddock, carried out of the centre by weary looking rescue workers, their faces caked in powdery dust.

In villages and towns nearby a similar ritual was being observed. By this morning rescue workers said more than 179 people were dead and 1,500 injured, in Italy’s deadliest earthquake for nearly 30 years.

Tens of thousands more had been left homeless – all struck by a random tragedy.

[ Source Guardian ]