AMATRICE, Italy (AP) — The mayor of the central-Italian city of Amatrice says rescue teams are trying to reach all of the city’s 69 hamlets following this morning’s powerful earthquake and numerous aftershocks.

There are reports of as many as 50 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Crews are trying to dig out survivors.

Italy’s forestry police say they’ve rescued dozens of people from rubble in the town of Pescara del Tronto.

A geologist in Poland says that the magnitude 6 earthquake in central Italy was caused by the slow but constant under-surface movement of the African Plate toward Europe.

Jerzy Zaba of the Silesian University in Katowice, in southern Poland, said Wednesday that a wedge-shaped front of the African Plate is pressing into the Eurasian Plate in the Adriatic Sea region and pushes into the neighboring regions, like Italy’s Apennine Mountains. The tension that accumulates leads to a sudden release in the form of under-surface rock movement that causes earth tremors.

Zaba told Polish PAP agency that the African Plate is moving northwards at the speed of up to 2 inches a year.