Sometimes the most powerful gesture one can make is to simply be a voice of calm and comfort in the middle of a crisis.
Such was the case in a quiet moment captured on camera in the Italian town of Capodacqua on Aug. 24, just hours after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake ravaged parts of central Italy.
In footage captured by Italy’s State Forestry Corp, a rescue worker comforts an elderly woman left trapped in the rubble of her home.
While the video doesn’t show the elderly woman’s ultimate fate, local media reports say she was eventually freed and taken to hospital in Ascoli Piceno.
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Neither her name nor the name of the rescue worker have been released.
Italy’s civil protection agency says the death toll from the earthquake has reached 73.
The head of the agency’s emergency service, Immacolata Postiglione, gave the breakdown at a briefing Wednesday but stressed that the figures were still provisional.
The civil protection agency is co-ordinating the rescue, which has involved hundreds of crews from across Italy and the Vatican. It is setting up tent cities around the hard-hit towns to care for the thousands of people left homeless.
Sniffer dogs, earthmovers and other heavy equipment are arriving in the quake zone to help with the rescue effort.
More than 12 hours after the quake struck, a slow procession of earth-moving vehicles loaded on the beds of firetrucks made their way to the edge of the hard-hit hilltop town of Amatrice.
Rescue teams poured in from nearby regions: cave experts from Umbria, Alpine rescue experts from Abruzzo and canine units from elsewhere in Italy.
-With files from the Associated Press
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