It was 9pm on 6 May 1976 when Friuli-Venezia Giulia was devastated by a 6.5 magnitude earthquake, one of the most violent ever recorded in post-war Italy. In sixty seconds, over 120 municipalities were razed to the ground, almost a thousand people lost their lives and more than one hundred thousand were left homeless. Men in uniform moved among the rubble of that night and, with very few means and extraordinary determination, tried to rescue the survivors from the darkness and silence. One of them was Giorgio Godina, then a young official of the Udine Fire Brigade. Today, at 83 years old, he has entrusted the story of that night to his voice, with the clarity of someone who knows that certain images are never forgotten.
View this post on Instagram
Sixty seconds that changed everything
The shock came without warning, very violent. Godina was in the garage of the barracks together with three other colleagues. While the others ran out into the open, he chose differently: knowing that the tiles and lighter elements of the buildings could come loose and hit those fleeing, he threw himself under a fire engine, using the vehicle as a shield. When the shaking stopped, he went out and immediately gave the first order: all the vehicles had to be moved immediately to the open courtyard, ready for any intervention and protected from further structural failures. In less than three minutes, the teams were up and running. But no call came.
The decision to go out without knowing where to go
The minutes passed and the phone lines remained eerily silent. Godina immediately understood the reason: those who had managed to save themselves would never have returned to the house to call the firefighters. As he wrote in the memo he still keeps, “I knew that the fight against time had begun”, but it was clear that help would not come to the firefighters alone. It was their turn to look for him. With the driver Aldo Pascoli, a trusted man described as a “highly operational” person capable of completing any task, Godina got into the company car and set off towards the North, in the direction from which the tremors were coming.
An apocalyptic landscape beyond the barracks gates
Just outside the Udine barracks, reality showed itself in all its brutality. On the side of the road lay a woman with her head smashed, hit by the cross of the bell tower of a nearby church. Continuing north, the scenery became more and more dramatic. As Godina says,
I was immediately struck by the profound darkness, the lack of electricity; everything was enveloped by the thick and boundless cloud of dust created by the collapses.
The streets were blocked by ruins and entire portions of collapsed buildings: it was almost impossible to enter the residential areas. As he advanced, Godina communicated via radio everything he could see with the light of his headlights and a powerful portable projector, reporting addresses, collapsed buildings, and the presumed number of people trapped. The other provincial commands listening to Udine’s radio channel 12 were already preparing to move.
Gemona: «Everything I had reported had to be multiplied by 100»
When the car approached Gemona del Friuli, a glance was enough to understand the extent of the catastrophe. Godina immediately notified by radio that what had been reported up to that point
for Gemona del Friuli it had to be multiplied by 100.
He decided to stop there, interrupting vehicular radio contact, and to personally dedicate himself to active rescue together with Pascoli. There were only two of them, in the middle of what he himself would later define. An overturned and tortured world, equipped only with fire protection and two pairs of work gloves each. It was precisely at that moment that both were struck by an intense sense of despondency, profound anguish and a feeling of complete helplessness and great vulnerability.
The silent dignity of the Friulian people
In the midst of the devastation, they were helped by the same people affected by the earthquake. The Friulians, despite the pain, showed the rescuers where to go, inviting them to continue without wasting time, to stop where moans could still be heard, to abandon the places where no one was responding anymore. Godina remembers with admiration that great human dignity and admirable composure,
that high respect and full resignation for the unfortunate fate of their loved ones, defining it “a splendid and unforgettable life lesson”.
Shortly afterwards, they were joined by Franco Sabidussi, an off-duty firefighter living in Gemona, who was seriously injured in the hand in an attempt to break down the door of his house to take his wife and son born a few days earlier to the hospital. He joined the group anyway, acting as a guide through the streets of the town.
The hospital, the rubble, a man who didn’t make it
The rescuers first went to the civil hospital in front of the Cathedral, where the medical staff had already evacuated the entire structure. Patients and wounded lay in the courtyard. Godina and his men unloaded mattresses and blankets from above to make the beds of those who were suffering less hard, until a new strong tremor interrupted the work, causing further damage to the building and hitting the rescuers with stones and rubble during their escape from the upper floors. Subsequently, they worked for a long time to free a man who had been buried under the collapsed roof of his house, who had joined them while he was resting.
He was injured but alive. In order not to waste time removing the rubble, they decided to dismantle the lower part of the wooden bed on which he was lying, lowering the frame and thus recovering the man without having to move him. But as soon as he was freed, the man let out a deep gasp and died.
Public housing: the drama of an entire family
Among the most harrowing interventions was the one in public housing, where one of the five buildings in the complex had collapsed completely in on itself, with the roof in direct contact with the external paving. Rescuers climbed up the slope of the rubble and entered the building through the roof skylight.
Inside, in the now feeble light of the portable lamps, they found the members of a family: the parents and a small child still in his mother’s arms. The adults were already dead. The child was alive, but held down by the weight of the mother’s body, who was in turn crushed by a large reinforced concrete beam.
Without the right equipment, Godina went out to ask the neighbors for help, but no one felt like going back into the house. Following the residents’ directions, he and Pascoli found the necessary tools in the boiler of one of the buildings, breaking the concrete of the beam and cutting the steel reinforcement. The beam was moved, the mother’s body separated. But just at that moment, the baby stopped crying and passed away.
«A rag hanging from the roof»: the little girl’s rescue
The team was about to leave the venue, disheartened by yet another failure, when Godina decided to do one last reconnaissance before leaving. Bent on his knees due to the limited height available, he advanced with the flashlight aimed as far away as possible. The dust made everything confusing, the eyes swollen and irritated. It was then that he glimpsed something unusual:
I thought I saw a rag hanging from the roof, but by feeling my hands I understood that it was a long lock of human hair.
He came even closer. It appeared before him
the dusty face with two wide eyes and the fixed gaze of a little girl crying in absolute silence,
crouched with the left leg bent backwards and blocked under the weight of another reinforced concrete beam. He called the team back, the structure was cut down and the little girl was taken out through the skylight, handed over to the paramedics on the street.
It was a moment of extreme joy and satisfaction for all the members of the firefighting team, recalls Godina. This episode marked my professional life forever.
An emergency car that quickly set in motion
At dawn, from radio contact, Godina learned that firefighters from the regional and Triveneto commands had already been operating in the area for hours. The enormous rescue machine was set in motion quickly. In total, 1,500 firefighters and 558 vehicles arrived from all over Italy to dig through the rubble and assist the population. Aldo Pascoli, the driver who had shared that night with Godina, remembers the road bridges raised about fifty centimeters by the violence of the earthquake, the operations that continued for several days, the search for a missing person in the Alpine barracks. Only after three days was he able to visit his family, who fortunately had not suffered any damage.
The price paid and the lesson that remains
The final toll of the Friuli earthquake was 965 victims. Among these, four firefighters who lost their lives in a tragic helicopter accident during rescue operations. A sacrifice that remains an integral part of the memory of that land. For Godina, that night was also an extraordinary school: the technical solutions learned in Gemona, the emergency management in extreme conditions, were useful in all the interventions that followed in the following years. Today, almost fifty years later, Giorgio Godina recounts that night with the voice of someone who has seen the worst that nature is capable of and the best that man is capable of. And he ends his story with a single sentence:
I’m proud of the work I’ve done.
