A fire broke out in an EVN cabinet in front of a residential building on "Boris Trajkovski" boulevard in Kisela Voda, early on Friday morning. Electrical cables burned, the building was left without power, and residents - woken by loud blasts and thick smoke - fled down the stairs in panic, many barefoot and in pyjamas.

The scene the residents describe sounds like a film, but it is entirely real. Around 5:45, the entrance filled with smoke within minutes, families with small children fled without even managing to grab their phones or documents. The fire was put out by crews from the Skopje fire brigade.

There is one detail that makes the whole story harder. On the ground floor of the building there is a working kindergarten - and that is exactly why residents say they were lucky the fire broke out in the early morning hours, while the place was empty. When luck is what stands between you and tragedy, something in the system isn't working the way it should.

Residents are demanding a full investigation - whether the fire started from an equipment fault, from poor maintenance, from a badly installed wiring job, or from negligence. They claim the fire appeared exactly where EVN had recently carried out technical works. Whether that is coincidence or consequence is for the authorities to answer.

And here is the question every resident in every building asks themselves. How many cabinets like this, full of cables, stand in front of our entrances, last checked - when? Until something burns, everything is "fine". And when it does burn, it always turns out that someone warned about it long ago.