The Fire From Ǵorče Petrov Crossed Into Kosovo, and Our Helicopter Is Putting It Out on Their Side: 31 Fires in 24 Hours

The fire that started in the Gračani area of the Ǵorče Petrov municipality is no longer our problem in the administrative sense - it is burning on Kosovo's territory. The fire did not ask permission at the border.

According to the Crisis Management Centre, 31 open-air fires were recorded in the country over 24 hours. Twenty-seven were extinguished, three were under control, and one - the one near Gračani - carried on across the border belt.

Three hotspots were brought under control: the low forest near the Saraj village of Kopanica, the mixed forest at the Ramno site on Skopska Crna Gora in the Čučer-Sandevo municipality, and the stretch between the Struga villages of Burinec and Lokov.

We sent a helicopter over there

This is the part worth noting. The centre announced that, at Kosovo's request, Macedonia deployed an Interior Ministry helicopter to help with fires in the Hani i Elezit area. So our machine is putting out fires on their side, while our fire heads onto their ground.

That is exactly what regional cooperation looks like when it works - no press releases about friendship, just a helicopter in the air. The Balkans rarely get this shot.

But then the number jumped

By 6pm the same day the picture had changed: 23 fires, eight of them active. A pine forest was burning near Belica in Makedonski Brod, pasture on Mount Bistra, low vegetation near the Veles village of Kočilari, where the fire also spread into the Sveti Nikole municipality.

And then there are the landfills. Kratovo. Between Monospitovo and Borievo in Bosilovo. Vizbegovo, behind a hotel. The Bukovo landfill in Ohrid.

A burning landfill is not a natural disaster. It is waste somebody dumped where they should not have, set alight in an unsecured spot, in a week when the temperatures do not drop. Every such call-out uses up a crew that could have been on a forest fire in the same hour.

The appeals from the authorities are the usual ones - do not light fires outdoors, do not clear fields with fire, do not dump waste in illegal landfills. Those appeals are repeated every summer, with the same wording.

The question nobody asks is a different one: how many of those burning illegal landfills are at a known location, reported and registered before they caught fire? If the answer is "most of them", then putting them out is the last link in a much longer chain nobody caught at the start.