Rescue workers search for people at the Hotel Rigopiano on Jan. 19, 2017. (Italian Fire Department via EPA)

Rescuers have made contact with at least 10 survivors Friday who huddled for two days in the rubble of a resort hotel buried under tons of snow that roared down a mountainside in central Italy, an official said.

Several of those trapped were brought to safety through tunnels carved through the snow while others awaited rescuers. The spokesman for Italy’s firefighting service, Luca Cari, told reporters that 10 people have been detected so far in the rubble of the hotel even as the death toll climbed to four.

That leaves about 15 people unaccounted for since late Wednesday, when the Hotel Rigopiano was swallowed by a huge avalanche that also blocked the only road leading to the four-star alpine resort.

Rescuers concentrated on areas where people could have been huddled in air pockets formed by partially collapsed walls under snow that reached 15 feet in some places.

Marco Bini, a member of a police alpine rescue unit, said some of the survivors were found in a kitchen area that withstood the force of the avalanche. A video posted by Italy’s state news agency, ANSA, showed a woman and boy being pulled from a tunnel dug through the snow.

“Brava. Brava,” rescuers said as they hauled the woman into daylight.

Helicopters have been sent to the site, 4,000 feet in the Gran Sasso mountains in the Abruzzo region.

[For Italy hotel buried by avalanche, first cries of help, then silence]

“We have been working since last night under extreme conditions to look for survivors,” Matteo Gasparini, head of the alpine rescue service, told ANSA. “The dogs are often perceiving smells, but we will have to dig for more than four or five meters [13 to 16 feet] before we reach the ground.”

It appears that many of the guests had packed their belongings and gathered in the hotel lobby and hallways when the earthquake struck Wednesday evening, the hotel director said by phone on a live TV talk show hosted by Barbara D’Urso, a regular guest of the hotel.

Director Bruno Di Tommaso said guests were worried about the earthquakes that shook the region that day and were preparing to leave, but the road was blocked by snow.

Di Tommaso had descended to the nearby city of Pescara to coordinate road-clearing efforts and send snow vehicles to evacuate the guests — vehicles that apparently never arrived.

He estimated that 11 staff members and 24 guests were in the hotel that evening, but he said no one had anticipated an avalanche. Several people avoided the crush of snow and splintered trees, and were among the first to contact emergency officials.

A manslaughter investigation has been opened into the incident over the possibility that the threat of an avalanche was not taken seriously enough, Italian media reported.

Footage of the hotel interior showed walls of snow peppered with tree branches that had punched through the building and into the main rooms.

Quakes have been shaking the area since August, when 300 people died in a 6.2 magnitude temblor. Meanwhile, the season’s unusually heavy snowfall has been more than the mountains could contain. The combination resulted in the fatal avalanche.

Schemm reported from Addis Ababa, Ethi­o­pia, and Murphy from Washington.

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