Death Toll in Italian Collapse Rises to 34

Screams of relatives punctuated the recovery of bodies Friday at a flattened apartment house in the southern city of Foggia, the scene of Italy’s deadliest building collapse in decades. The death toll rose to 34, with almost as many still missing.

One of the latest bodies retrieved was blackened by a slow-burning fire seeping through the underground garage, where many of the victims were believed trapped.

The fire further lessened hope of finding any more survivors. Hundreds of rescuers worked night and day, digging away the hill of dust and debris by the clattering bucketful rather than move heavy machinery to where there might be victims.

The six-floor building collapsed early Thursday, trapping 70 to 75 people inside. Authorities said 17 residents escaped or were rescued. The last of them, a 25-year-old man, was pulled out after dark Thursday.

The disaster occurred 70 miles northeast of Naples in Foggia, a 150,000-resident city of laborers and farm workers that is surrounded by plains of corn and wheat.

It was Italy’s deadliest building collapse since 1959, when 58 people died in a collapse in the southern city of Barletta.

At midmorning Friday, a gauze-masked searcher recognized a corpse as that of a female relative. He cried out, his sobs soon drowned out by the anguished shrieks of a woman relative waiting for news nearby.

Giuseppe Iammelli, 12, stood on the sidewalk, hands in jeans pockets.

He was waiting for searchers to bring his 14-year-old friend out alive--even though adults at school had told him to pray for the boy’s soul.

“Maybe he’s in the debris,” the boy said. “Maybe he’s alive.”

A number of theories were offered for what caused the collapse, none conclusive: construction that used substandard steel bars or concrete; a sudden settling of the sandy soil; renovation work on the underground garage; water eroding the foundation.

Foggia officials defended the construction. Newspapers pointed out that the builder himself had lived in the rooftop apartment, although it was not clear if he still lived in the building at the time of the disaster.

Whatever the cause, Italy’s national statistics institute said 3.5 million houses nationwide are at risk of similar collapse.

Age has weakened some. Cut-rate building during the south’s construction boom meant some structures were weak to begin with.

“There’s no monitoring,” said Giuseppe Roma, director of the statistics bureau. “To put it in a word, the territory is out of control.”

In Rome, lawmakers urged passage of legislation that would mandate periodic inspections of buildings.