Italy: Like Pompeii . . .

A twisted bicycle. A flattened toy gun. A silver corkscrew. A blue-handled screwdriver. A brass hand mirror. A child’s pencil case. A green alarm clock. A yellowed baby picture. A small wad of lire. A mattress. A red and black shawl. A lone playing card (the king of clubs). An ancient Olivetti typewriter. A crumpled Fiat. An electric pylon twisted off its concrete base. A church steeple protruding from the mud. Such were the scattered remains of a town called Longarone, which last week was wiped off the face of the earth.

At 10:35 one night, while most of Longarone’s inhabitants slept or watched a soccer game on television, a huge chunk of a nearby mountain called Toe broke loose and fell 650 ft. into the 873-ft.-high Vaiont Dam, 2½ miles from the town. The splash sent a 300-ft.-high tidal wave across the reservoir. Spilling over the lip, the avalanche of water cascaded into a gorge leading to the nearby Piave River. It churned up tons of rock and mud, and hit Longarone. Then the flood bounced off a mountainside, turned around, hit Longarone again, and continued down the Piave Valley.

Sudden Darkness. Householders in neighboring towns leaped from their beds fearing an earthquake as the torrent of water and debris thundered past. Then they noticed that the lights of Longarone had gone out. In just seven minutes, virtually everything and everybody in the chalet-bedecked villaggio had been swept away by water or entombed in mud. With pickaxes and shovels, soldiers dug fearfully into the muck, by week’s end had unearthed 1,500 bodies. Of Longarone’s peaceful populace of 3,500, the carabinieri feared that only a handful survived.*

Poking through the scant ruins, Public Works Minister Fiorentino Sullo mourned: “A truly Biblical disaster, like Pompeii.” As the dead were stacked in a mass grave, angry Italians demanded an investigation. Before Vaiont Dam was built four years ago, local residents tried to get the hydroelectric project halted on grounds that the surrounding mountains were too avalanche prone. Mount Toe threw down such landslides so regularly that its nickname was “The Walking Mountain.” But the government approved the reservoir anyway.

Creeping Warning. Last week, with Italy’s Communists eagerly in the forefront, critics asked why the private electric company that constructed the dam before its nationalization a few months ago did not build a retaining wall to hold back Mount Toe. Moreover, loose earth had been creeping down the mountainside for two weeks prior to the disaster; the dam’s supervisors had lowered the reservoir level 21 ft. and evacuated some smaller villages above the reservoir. But even though it lay directly in the dam’s path, Longarone was not evacuated.

In an effort to pacify the survivors, Premier Giovanni Leone flew to the scene. He was not notably successful. Leone promised: “We will build you a new city.” Asked one man bitterly: “What will we put inside the houses? Coffins?”

* If so—the final toll may not be known for weeks—the tragedy would surpass the worst previous dam disaster on record, the U.S.’s Johnstown, Pa., flood of 1889, which claimed 2,209 lives.