Fresh tremors shake village of disaster

The grief-stricken village of San Giuliano, which lost 26 of its children when the local school collapsed in an earthquake on Thursday, was living with grim irony yesterday.

After being ordered from their homes in the wake of further tremors – there were two more yesterday, of 3.7 and 3.8 on the Richter scale – two-thirds of San Giuliano's 1,200 people are sheltering in the sports hall: the same sports hall where the children and three adult victims of the massive quake had earlier been laid out in their coffins.

The rest of the population moved into a camp of sky-blue tents, amid olive groves on a hill above the village. For the time being no one is permitted back in their homes, except to collect essential possessions. According to the mayor of San Giuliano, Antonio Borrelli, 80 per cent of the village's houses have been so damaged they must be pulled down and rebuilt.

As the bereaved parents struggle to come to terms with the loss of their children, shocking facts have emerged of political prevarication and bureaucratic incompetence that left San Giuliano cruelly unprepared for Thursday's disaster.

In 1990 the Italian parliament passed a law requiring that school buildings be made secure, with a deadline of March 1993. But when schools complained that the deadline was impossible to meet, it was put off – not once, but four times. Now the schools have until 31 December 2004 to comply. Had the standards been in force, it is probable that the new upper floor, added two years ago to accommodate middle school pupils, would never have been built. This new ferroconcrete structure, placed on top of a building which had been erected nearly 50 years ago, at a time when there was no building code for earthquake resistance, is widely blamed for the school's collapse.

And another blunder has come to light. Although this part of the Molise region had not experienced a major earthquake for 700 years, geologists became aware recently of a heightened risk. In 1998 new maps of earthquake hazard zones were published, according to which San Giuliano and villages nearby were reclassified as "second category danger''. But somewhere between the offices of the Ministry of Public Works and the Department of Civil Protection the relevant documents got lost. The official notification – which, again, should have halted the ill-advised second floor addition in its tracks, never arrived.

As it is, the unfortunate mayor of San Giuliano, Mr Borrelli, is the only solid target of abuse and recrimination – even though the story that the village priest urged him to close the school on Thursday morning has been denied by the priest himself.

Indeed the 40-year-old mayor, with three days' growth of beard and dark shadows under his eyes, is as much the tragic victim of the disaster as anyone. His six-year-old daughter Antonella was among those who died under the rubble. "She was lively, a bit of a lunatic, a bit rebellious,'' he remembered between sobs. "She often complained because I was not at home often enough. She was just starting to read.'' At the sports hall, little Antonella was laid out in her small coffin and her favourite maroon coloured blouse and suede skirt were laid on top along with snapshots of happy times: with her four-year-old brother Michele (who survived), with her mother Carmela, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.

''With hindsight it's easy to say anything,'' said Mr Borrelli "The fact is that Thursday morning was a morning like any other, a morning like today.'' Then he corrects himself. "No, for the love of God, not like today ... "

The tremor in the night, at three or four in the morning, "hardly dislodged a flake of plaster", said the mayor. He was just outside the village when the big quake occurred. "I felt the shock and saw a huge cloud of dust apparently rising from our village. Immediately I jumped into my car and drove home ... I ran to the school and began digging like a lunatic, waiting for the arrival of the rescue services. Then I had to make a tour of the village, to inspect the damage. Practically everything has been ruined here, 80 per cent of houses are uninhabitable. It's scandalous to point the finger just at the school.''

Today Antonella and her 25 schoolmates will be laid to rest; flags fly at half mast on all public buildings in the country and it is expected that President Carlo Ciampi will attend the funeral. Two inquiries have been ordered into the disaster and will soon begin work. The public prosecutor of Larino, the nearest large town, has ordered the local village authority to furnish documents concerning the building work two years ago and the Ministry of Public Works has set up a commission of inquiry into the reason for the building's collapse.

"I'm not afraid of anyone,'' retorts Mr Borrelli when the subject of the inquiries comes up, "and above all my conscience is clear. But I'm not the mayor any more. I am nothing now.''