A group of urban explorers were left stunned when they entered the ghostly town of — evacuated by 20,000 residents overnight following a devastating earthquake
A team of urban explorers were left astonished by the “overwhelming” finds in a town deserted for 15 years.
Dan, from the Exploring With Fighters YouTube channel, guided his crew into the eerie Italian town of Fossa, which was evacuated in April 2009 after a catastrophic earthquake triggered concerns about a mountainside collapse. “I’m not joking when I say it feels like the city itself is heartbroken,” he remarked.
“It’s just an overwhelming feeling.”
The explorers’ video shows a home where a dining table is still laid, with kitchen drawers pulled open during a desperate hunt for valuables before inhabitants escaped. Dan also stumbles upon touching remnants of disrupted lives.
Amongst them are an old-fashioned pram and a child’s bicycle, abandoned in the pandemonium, reports the Mirror.
Fractured walls testify to the earthquake’s force, registering over 3.5 on the Richter scale, with structures dangerously close to collapse. “I don’t think I even want to go upstairs in this place,” Dan observes while entering a property almost split in two by the catastrophe.
In another haunting discovery, a calendar remains stuck in time, undisturbed since that tragic April evening in 2009. Families would have been compelled to grab their children from their beds and hurry them into the night’s blackness as the ground shook violently beneath them.
The ancient church stands precariously on the brink of collapse, with even the faintest tremor from the neighbouring fault line risking sending it tumbling down the hillside. “Because of a lot of the buildings they built up here don’t use reinforced steel, they just started cracking and crumbling and they got a call in the early hours of the morning that there was going to be a serious earthquake and everyone had to evacuate forever,” Dan reveals.
“There were 20,000 people. When you read the stories online it is heartbreaking there are stories of people dragging their kids out of beds as the as the walls are falling in.”
Houses stand deserted, still packed with personal possessions such as pot plants and televisions, all blanketed beneath a thick coating of dust, with numerous ceilings having collapsed after years of abandonment.
Dan comes across a shop that has been completely looted, yet strangely, a handful of beer bottles and Fanta cans, out of date since 2009, remain perched atop one of its fridges.
The town centre cuts a haunting figure, reclaimed by nature as branches and vines snake through shattered windows and push up through the cracked pavements.
Nestled on the hillside, the town boasts homes with picturesque balconies overlooking the valley below, though Dan cautions visitors against the risk of venturing out onto them.
Dan compares the town to Fukushima, the Japanese settlement devastated by a catastrophic earthquake in 2011, which triggered a catastrophic nuclear disaster at the neighbouring power plant.
The incident also prompted a massive evacuation, uprooting more than 100,000 residents.
