A team of urban explorers were left astounded 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, evacuated in April 2009 after a catastrophic earthquake that triggered concerns of a mountainside collapse.
“I’m not joking when I say it feels like the city itself is heartbroken,” he said. “It’s just an overwhelming feeling.” The explorers’ footage shows a residence where a dining table remains laid, with kitchen drawers thrown open in a desperate hunt for valuables before inhabitants escaped. Dan also stumbles upon moving remnants of life disrupted.
Amongst them is an antique pram and a child’s bicycle, abandoned in the pandemonium.
Fractured walls testify to the earthquake’s power, registering over 3.5 on the Richter scale, with structures swaying dangerously close to collapse. “I don’t think I even want to go upstairs in this place,” Dan remarks while entering a property almost split in two by the catastrophe.
In another haunting scene, a calendar remains suspended in time, undisturbed since that tragic April night in 2009. Families would have been compelled to grab their children from slumber and hurry them away in the night’s blackness as the ground shook below them.
The ancient church balances on the brink of devastation, with even the smallest tremor from the adjacent fault line threatening to send it crashing down the mountainside.
“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.”
Properties stand deserted, still containing personal possessions such as pot plants and televisions, all covered in a substantial layer of dust, with numerous ceilings collapsed following years of abandonment. Dan discovers a shop that has been completely looted, yet oddly, several bottles of beer and cans of Fanta, which expired in 2009, sit atop one of its fridges.
The town centre displays an eerie spectacle, reclaimed by nature as branches and vines thread through shattered windows and emerge from the cracked pavements.
Situated on the mountainside, the town boasts homes with picturesque balconies providing vistas of the valley beneath, but Dan cautions against venturing onto them.
Dan compares the town to Fukushima, the Japanese settlement that suffered a devastating earthquake in 2011, resulting in a catastrophic nuclear disaster at the neighbouring power plant. This event also prompted a mass evacuation, forcing over 100,000 inhabitants to flee.
