Greek students from the Italian city L’Aquila have been worried about the seismic activity in the region for the past few weeks and were expecting a big quake. They didn’t hide their fears from their parents, who advised them what to do in case of an earthquake. This is what most of the students say, who returned from Italy after the 6.3 magnitude quake, which shook the country on Monday morning and took 200 victims.

The 28 year old mechanics student Vasilis Koufoulias was not an exception. He was even thinking to change his apartment with his sister. At the night of the earthquake, he was in his room and his sister Dionisia was sleeping in the room next door. At the time of the quake, Dionisia was luckier than her brother and managed to escape by only getting a minor leg injury. Right now she is in a hospital in Pekara.

After the earthquake, Vasilis’ friends firstly called his girlfriend, who was living in the apartment building next door. Terrified, she asked them for help because her and her roommate were blocked in the room and couldn’t open the door. Many of L’Aquila citizens talk about the same phenomenon – after the quake, their doors were blocked and they couldn’t open them.

Firstly Vasilis’ friends ran to help his girlfriend and her friend – they broke the door with their bare hands. After that they started calling Vasilis and when they saw the building, where the boy was living they understood the terrifying truth. The rescue team was trying to dig out the 28 year old Greek for more than 24 hours. The boy’s mother arrived and was constantly speaking to her son in order to give him courage.

It was her who told Dionisia not to worry for Vasilis, because he was talking to the rescue team through his phone and they were advising him what to do in order to keep his strength. Something, which never happened. The rescuers did not tell her when they dug out the body of her son. He was transported to the hospital and the identification of the body was done by neighbors of the boy. The mother found out the hard truth when there was no doubt that was Vasilis’ body.

Greek seismologists continue following the seismic activity in central Italy but are certain that those tremors are caused by a different type of seismic focus then the ones in Greece. Except for that, the quake is very weak, in order to cause earthquakes in neighboring seismic regions. Experts explain that with such tremor strength the victims are so many because the epicenter is on land and not in the sea, which usually happens in Greece and second, because the quake wave had a small radius and this was the reason for so many destructions in the region.