The fire started on Thursday around eight in the evening at Lokva Rogoznica. By two in the morning it was already in Omiš - not above the town, in the town. Fifty metres from the centre. Once a fire crosses those last fifty metres, it stops being a wildfire story and becomes something else.

Around a thousand people were evacuated. Some left on foot, some by bus, some on Port Authority boats - because the Adriatic coastal road was closed and the route towards Makarska was blocked. When the only way out of a seaside town is the sea, that already tells you how fast this moved.

Ten injured, gas cylinders exploding

At least ten people were injured, two seriously. Mayor Zvonko Močić confirmed that one man with burns was rushed to hospital. Part of the town lost power. According to reports from the scene, gas cylinders were exploding constantly, and the sirens of the fire service, the ambulances and the police did not stop.

Dozens of vehicles burned out on the coastal road. There is footage of a driver fleeing a car already on fire. These are not wildfire scenes - these are scenes from a town with nowhere to retreat to, squeezed between rock and water.

„We are fighting something stronger than us”

The line came from a firefighter from Dubrovnik, reporting from the fire itself. It is not rhetoric. Chief fire commander Slavko Tucaković ordered an urgent transfer of forces from inland - crews from the Koprivnica-Križevci, Krapina-Zagorje and Bjelovar-Bilogora counties and from Zagreb, on top of those already sent from Zadar, Šibenik and Dubrovnik. When you throw people from half the country at one fire, you are admitting local capacity is spent.

The water bombers could only come at first light. That is physics, not a failure - aircraft do not fly at night over terrain like that. But it also means the town spends the most dangerous eight hours with nothing but people, hoses and the wind against it.

A café owner says it was deliberate

The owner of a local café said his wife saw how it began and that the fire was set on purpose. That is a claim, not a finding - the investigation has yet to say anything. But if it is confirmed, then the story is not about climate and drought, it is about a person who, in the worst possible wind, set fire to the hill above a town full of tourists. They chose.

Why this is not somebody else's news

Omiš in August is not merely a Croatian town. It is a destination packed with guests from across the region, Macedonia included - people who are now sleeping in a sports hall on Red Cross mattresses, if they were lucky enough to reach it. The reception centre in the Ribnjak hall took in around a thousand people overnight.

The Balkans know this scene by heart. Every summer, a different country, the same script: wind, hills covered in dry pine, houses built right up to the treeline, and firefighters arriving from the other end of the country because the local ones cannot cope any more. The question nobody wants to ask out loud is whether anyone actually plans for this, or whether every year we wait for the fire to start and only then mobilise.

Močić said one sentence overnight that summed the whole thing up: we have to survive this night. Morning will show how many houses are gone.