It wasn't a „strong wind." The State Hydrometeorological Administration said what anyone who watched roofs flying yesterday already knew in their gut: the wind that struck Skopje, Štip and Strumica had the strength of a hurricane. By the Administration's own definition, that means speeds over 118 km/h - a phenomenon that, they say, „occurs very rarely in this territory and causes heavy destruction and significant widespread damage."

The automatic stations leave no room for downplaying it. The strongest gust, 134 km/h, was recorded in Štip, with 130 km/h in Skopje and Novo Selo. This isn't a summer storm - it's a number you usually read in reports from the Caribbean, not from the Vardar valley.

The scale is measured in phone calls. Over 9,000 calls for help reached the 112 line in a matter of hours. In Skopje alone, by ten in the evening, there were 117 damaged vehicles, 35 damaged roofs, 189 fallen trees, seven wrecked traffic lights, ten fires and ten injured people on record. Each of those figures is somebody's car, somebody's flat, somebody's morning that starts with cleanup instead of coffee.

In the hospitals, the tally of the injured kept climbing. At the „St. Naum of Ohrid" surgical clinic, 22 people came in for examination, and two were kept for hospital treatment. One was operated on during the night for a broken arm. The other is a foreign tourist, injured by a falling tree around the pelvis - a man who came to Macedonia on holiday and leaves with a hurricane story. At the trauma clinic, according to the health minister, 11 patients were admitted, three of them with serious fractures.

Most injuries are minor and were treated on an outpatient basis, and that's the only good news in the whole picture. But the question left hanging over the ripped-open roofs isn't meteorological. If the Administration says winds like this are expected „very rarely," why does the city - the trees, the traffic lights, the old structures - fall at the first such blow? The rarity of the event is no excuse for the unpreparedness of the infrastructure. Next time it blows 130 an hour, will we count roofs again, or will someone finally count what hasn't been maintained for years?