Three planes from the Directorate for Protection and Rescue flew over Studeničani again this evening. Crews from the Skopje fire brigade were on the ground with them, and the director of the Crisis Management Centre followed the fire line in person. The official message is that no populated area is currently under threat.

That is true, and it matters that it be said clearly. But the same sentence carries a second half: the crews are staying out there all night. When the services do not go home, the situation is not resolved - it is calmed. Anyone who lives below a fire line knows the difference between those two words.

The numbers that changed hour by hour

The morning snapshot looked good. Over the previous twenty-four hours 37 open-area fires had been recorded, of which by 7:30 three were active, one under control and 33 extinguished. By 1pm the figure had fallen to eight registered fires, four of them active. And then, just a few hours later, by 6pm the Crisis Management Centre had registered 22 fires - eight active, three under control and eleven extinguished.

That is not statistics rising in a straight line. That is a picture of a system spending all day chasing new hotspots while the old ones flare back up. Fires are not a task you finish by lunchtime - they go round in circles until the weather gives way.

Studeničani is not catching fire for the first time this week

The stretch Morane - Vrtekica - Ramni Gaber was already in the reports on previous days, with intervention from both the air and the ground. A new hotspot above Vržale has kept the crews out overnight again. That does not mean all those fires are one and the same line of flame, or that they share a cause. It means one and the same area has demanded planes, tankers and people several times in a short span.

And those resources are not unlimited. Every new fire pulls in crews and equipment that at that very moment may be needed in Prilep, Makedonski Brod or Ohrid - all of them were on today's map. When almost the whole country sits in a high-risk zone, a local fire stops being a local problem.

The hardest part comes once the planes land

Aerial firefighting is what you see in the footage. But it only works in daylight. At night the load returns entirely to the people on the ground, who have to hold the line through the hours when there is no help from above, and react if the wind turns.

So „no danger to populated areas\" should be read as exactly what it is - a snapshot assessment, not a conclusion. The fire is still burning. The cheapest preventive measure stays the same and it is free: no open flame outdoors, and every plume of smoke you spot goes straight to 112.