Valandovo mayor Đoko Kamčev is convinced the fire at the town's „Suva Reka“ landfill was set deliberately. That single sentence is worth more than the entire report around it, because it shifts the story from natural disaster to something else - something with a perpetrator.

A fire broke out around 1pm in the fields of the Valandovo village of Udovo. Fire crews were dispatched immediately. Almost simultaneously, while the first intervention was still under way, a second fire broke out - at the local landfill near Valandovo. Wind pulled the flames beyond the landfill into the surrounding low vegetation, and then up into the hills.

„Thanks to the second wave of firefighters sent here immediately, the fire was contained from spreading to other parts of the landfill, but it escaped up into the hills, where the terrain is extremely difficult to move through“, the Directorate for Protection and Rescue explained. It was precisely because of the steep, barely passable terrain, covered in dense thorny vegetation, that Kamčev requested air support. Two of the Directorate's „air tractors“ took off.

The fire was first brought partially under control, then fully localised. Units of the Valandovo fire service and staff from the local branch of the state forestry company remained on the ground.

The Valandovo fire service appealed to citizens not to burn stubble, dry vegetation or waste in open areas, warning that anyone caught or reported would be referred to the competent institutions. The appeal is accurate and necessary. But both the appeal and the referral arrive after the fire has already run up the hillside - and anyone who has watched a Macedonian summer knows how many times we hear that same sentence in that same month.

If the mayor says openly that the landfill was torched on purpose, then the question is not whether the firefighters did their job well - they clearly did, on a day with two fires, and they stopped the flames before they spread. The question is whether anyone will find the person who struck the first match, or whether this landfill too disappears into the statistics as one more „open-area fire“ with no perpetrator.