The government has declared a state of crisis across the entire country due to fire risk. It runs for 30 days, starting 1 August. The official wording says the decision „confirms the Government's commitment to act proactively“. Proactively - on 31 July, after a full month of burning.

The decision activates the Main Headquarters at the Crisis Management Centre, which will be in permanent session and has 24 hours to produce an action plan for preventing and fighting fires, an inventory of available human and material-technical resources, and a plan for coordinated action across all competent institutions. Every state administration body is instructed to make its capacities fully available.

Read that last part again. The plan for who has what and who does what is being written within 24 hours of 1 August. Which means that until yesterday, that document either did not exist, or was not good enough to apply without a declared crisis. In a country that burns every single summer, an inventory of available resources is not something you compile after the flames start - it is something that should sit finished in a drawer from April onwards.

On the same day the government met, two separate fires were burning in the Valandovo area, with two „air tractors“ from the Directorate for Protection and Rescue involved in putting them out. That is not an anecdote, that is context: the crisis decision did not come from a forecast, it came from ground that was already alight.

A state of crisis is not a bad thing - quite the opposite. It unlocks resources, coordination and a chain of command that does not exist under normal conditions. The problem is not that it was declared, but that it gets declared every year, and every year afterwards everything resets to the beginning: the same landfills, the same stubble fields, the same impassable terrain, the same number of aircraft.

It expires in 30 days. That is when one simple question is worth putting to the Main Headquarters: how much of that 24-hour action plan still applied in September, and how many of those „available capacities“ were genuinely available when they were needed?