«I was sleeping, I saw the flames rising violently and I immediately ran into the street. A real drama could have happened." Lucia Cadeddu, an 81-year-old widow, is one of the tenants of the building in Via Cultura, the three-storey building in Porto Torres, evacuated during the night due to a fire that broke out shortly after 3 in the morning. . A tragedy that only escaped for a few minutes : if the firefighters had not intervened so promptly, the first floors of the building would have been invaded by flames.
Six families were forced out of their homes in the Villaggio neighborhood by the local police company, who were the first to intervene after the alarm raised by a passer-by. The fire broke out in the boiler room , a small room on the ground floor of the building, transformed into a building material warehouse, with shelves, metal nets, plastic bags, polystyrene and PVC pipes inside. Easily flammable objects that fueled the flames, which reached the first floor.
The fire escaping from the grates of the doors and windows reached the walls of the highest floors, the smoke blackened the facade, the tongues of flame risked causing much more serious damage with violence. A malicious act probably committed by a group of vandals who frequent the area . The second act of vandalism carried out inside the technical compartment, targeted by thugs who underestimated the risks. The boiler inside the warehouse has been decommissioned for about 30 years, but the material stored inside represents a serious danger. The families complain about the degraded situation in which they live. «We need more controls, a no man's land where gangs of kids allow themselves to commit any crime - says one of the tenants of the building - we live among abandoned cars and uncivilized behavior which penalizes a neighborhood where elderly people with serious pathologies live. We haven't felt safe for too long, abandoned without any response."