"It's like my heart has been taken away. What I feel is inexplicable."

Luca Dessì, mayor of Villasimius, can barely hold back tears . At the end of a day to forget ( LA CRONACA ), he prefers to think on the bright side: "I can't even talk about what happened. Luckily, we got everyone safe, and the Coc system worked perfectly."

A team of administrators stood by him all evening, sparing no effort. "It can only be arson. It was the work of a madman, a criminal. It could have been a massacre."

Shortly after 2:00 PM yesterday, a plume of smoke billowed from the vegetation at the start of the road from Provincial Road 18 to Punta Molentis beach, quickly swelling into a huge black cloud that spread across the sky and cast darkness over everything : the open beach umbrellas, the beach chairs, the children's playground equipment. The dirt parking lot became a graveyard of cars reduced to ashes. Those who couldn't escape in time were stranded on the beach, where private dinghies and Port Authority vehicles evacuated hundreds of people .

It's hard to imagine what will happen from now on in the Sarrabus village. "In two hours, nothing is the same," says Sergio Ghiani, president of the Villasimius Tourist Consortium. "This was our jewel. We tried to protect it by limiting entry, but in the face of reckless criminals, there's nothing else we can do. We hope justice finds the person responsible, a murderer, not only because people could have died, but because of the animals that died ."

Read the full articles on the Punta Molentis disaster in L'Unione Sarda, available on newsstands, in the app, and in the digital edition.

© Riproduzione riservata