Italy death toll rises to 250

PESCARA DEL TRONTO, Italy -- Aftershocks in central Italy rattled residents and rescue workers Thursday as crews worked to find more earthquake survivors and the country anguished over its repeated failure to protect ancient towns and modern cities from seismic catastrophes.

A day after a shallow quake killed 250 people and leveled three small towns, a 4.3-magnitude aftershock sent up plumes of thick, gray dust in the hard-hit town of Amatrice. The aftershock crumbled already cracked buildings, prompted authorities to close roads and sent another person to the hospital.

It was one of the more than 470 temblors that have followed Wednesday's pre-dawn quake.

Firefighters and rescue crews using sniffer dogs worked in teams around the hard-hit areas in central Italy, pulling chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble where homes once stood.

Rescuers declined to say when their work would shift from saving lives to recovering bodies, noting one person was pulled alive from the rubble 72 hours after the 2009 quake in the Italian town of L'Aquila.

"We will work relentlessly until the last person is found and make sure no one is trapped," said Lorenzo Botti, a rescue-team spokesman.

Worst affected by the quake were the tiny towns of Amatrice and Accumoli near Rieti, 60 miles northeast of Rome, and Pescara del Tronto, 15 miles farther to the east.

Many were left homeless by the scale of the destruction, their homes and apartments declared uninhabitable. Some survivors, escorted by firefighters, were allowed to go back inside homes briefly Thursday to get essential necessities for what surely will be an extended absence.

Charitable assistance began pouring into the earthquake zone Thursday. Church groups from a variety of Christian denominations, along with farmers offering donated peaches, pumpkins and plums, sent vans along the one-way road into Amatrice that already was packed with emergency vehicles and trucks carrying sniffer dogs.

Italy's civil-protection agency said the death toll had risen to 250 Thursday afternoon, with at least 365 others hospitalized. Most of the dead -- 184 -- were in Amatrice. A Spaniard and five Romanians were among the dead, according to their governments.

There was no clear estimate of the missing. The rustic area was packed with summer vacationers ahead of a popular Italian food festival this weekend.

As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began.

Italy, which has the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe, also has thousands of picturesque medieval villages with old buildings that do not have to conform to the country's anti-seismic building codes. Making matters worse, those codes often aren't applied even when new buildings are built.

Some experts estimate 70 percent of Italy's buildings aren't built to anti-seismic standards, though not all are in high-risk areas.