By Vanessa Gera and Frances D’Emilio
The Associated Press
L’AQUILA, Italy — Though trapped by earthquake rubble for nearly two days, Eleonora Calesini was still alive when a powerful aftershock Tuesday night threatened to bring the world “crashing down on her again.”
Somehow, a pair of fallen reinforced concrete pillars that had created a survival space for the 20-year-old student held. And 90 minutes later, firefighters and police pulled Calesini, in her nightgown, conscious from the wreckage, her rescuers said.
When the aftershock hit, “we absolutely had the shivers,” police Lt. Antonio Del Boccio told Sky TG24 TV. “The Earth shook anew and panic struck” just as firefighters crawled in to rescue her.
“We feared the worst,” Del Boccio said. “We knew Eleonora was alive. And in that moment we thought the world would come crashing down on her again.”
The first time came at 3:32 a.m. Monday, as fellow students slept in the apartment house where Calesini, studying communications and computer science, rented a place. An earthquake had jolted the medieval town of L’Aquila.
As soon as he heard of the quake and did not hear from his daughter, Calesini’s father raced from their hometown near Rimini on the Adriatic to this Apennine mountain town.
On Tuesday morning, her father spotted an armoire that he recognized in the wreckage of her apartment building, recounted another rescuer, Police Detective Germano Di Cesare.
Rescuers then “immediately started clearing out debris, first by hand, then when they realized it was impossible to reach the place, they started using big earth-removal machines,” Di Cesare said.
As nightfall drew close, “we had given up any hope” of finding her. Then, a firefighter “sticking his head under the rubble, began to shout, ‘She’s alive! She’s alive!’ because he realized that somehow she was giving some signs of life,” Di Cesare told Sky.
“From that moment, it was a race against time, until, at 10 p.m., we succeeded in pulling her out.”
It wasn’t clear if the woman could immediately hear her rescuers since she is hard of hearing, said her grandfather, Renato Calesini, in a telephone interview from her hometown in Mondaini. She normally wears a hearing aid, but it might have been taken out before going to bed.
“This girl, in her misfortune, had the good luck of finding herself in a space created by two fallen beams, even though she had a leg compressed by a small, reinforced concrete beam,” Di Cesare said, adding her injury did not appear serious.
Her father immediately called home to give the news of her rescue.
“We were hitting our heads” in joy, the grandfather recalled, as neighbors jammed into his house to celebrate.
Italian news reports said Calesini was taken to a hospital by helicopter for treatment.