Two in the morning. The director of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, Stojanche Angelov, gets a phone call. On the other end - a woman's voice in a panic, who first gives her name and then, shouting, reports that the fire is approaching her house, the last in the row on the hill above Zelenikovo.

"From the panic in her voice I assumed the report was genuine and the situation alarming," Angelov recounts.

That is the beginning. The rest is a story about what happens when the system works - and when people do not wait to be told what to do.

The chain of calls

Angelov immediately called the Skopje firefighter on duty. The phone rang only once. On the other end they already knew - a vehicle from the Drachevo station had set off for the location.

Angelov himself was at that moment driving through the Jasen hunting grounds, returning from Makedonski Brod where arrangements for fighting a fire on high, hard-to-reach rocky terrain had been concluded that same evening. He turned toward Zelenikovo. Half an hour later he was at the critical spot, and the entire time he was travelling he stayed on the phone with the woman who called, trying to calm her.

The mayor who drove the vehicle himself

Meanwhile the mayor of Zelenikovo municipality, Kosta Manevski, was also informed about the fire. And there is a detail here worth pulling out of the whole story.

Manevski did not wait for a driver to be found. He started the municipal fire engine - acquired some time ago - and drove it himself right up to the houses the fire was moving toward. At the same time members of the Zelenikovo volunteer fire brigade arrived, having been alerted by him.

"Urgently, at 02:00 after midnight, he answered the citizens' call, showed presence of mind and instead of losing time waiting for someone to come for the fire engine, he started it himself and drove it to the place where the fire was burning," Angelov described.

The residents had already started

And the most important thing probably happened before anyone at all arrived.

The residents of the last houses had already been spraying water around the buildings and cutting back the brush and trees that could carry the fire further. That is partial protection done by hand, at night, by people who could see the flames moving toward them.

"Gratitude also to the residents who came out to fight the fire, exposing themselves to significant risk in the process; I found several of them on the spot," Angelov stated.

All together - residents, volunteers, the municipal vehicle and the Skopje fire crew - they stopped the fire before it reached the first houses. The blaze was brought under control without a single house being caught.

And now the part that is bigger than one night

Angelov announced that it has been agreed for the Zelenikovo volunteer firefighters to join the Directorate's Rapid Response Teams, with the Directorate providing them with protective uniforms, firefighting backpack sprayers and beaters for their future fire team.

Read that list. Uniforms. Backpack sprayers. Beaters. That is the equipment being promised to them now - which means last night they fought this blaze without it.

The people who saved a village did it with water and their own presence of mind, and the institution arrives afterwards with uniforms. It is good that it is arriving. The question is why the order is that way round, and how many villages in the country are waiting to burn in order to get a fire beater.

"A single spark is enough for a real catastrophe," Angelov said at the end. Last night above Zelenikovo the spark got within a few metres of the houses.