The Krasta landfill, where Kumanovo's rubbish ends up, is burning again - and once again there has been a meeting. Kumanovo mayor Maksim Dimitrievski, together with the council president and some councillors, MPs and the director of the public utility "Čistota i Zelenilo", met yesterday with residents of Pčinja, Vince and Studena Bara. The outcome: a promise of extra machinery and soil to cover the site.

"The Municipality of Kumanovo will bring in additional crews with heavy machinery to go out on the ground, and we will ask socially responsible companies in the city for help and for extra quantities of soil," Dimitrievski said. The problem, he admitted, is decades old, and this summer it was made worse by high temperatures and "insufficient intervention with machinery" at the landfill itself.

Six months in the smoke. What it looks like from the other side of the fence was described by Aleksandar Ilievski, head of the Pčinja local community. The valley has been wrapped in smoke for more than six months. Seven villages with more than 5,000 residents lie in it, and the smoke can be smelled 30 kilometres away, as far as Katlanovo. "We are farmers, we spend more than 10 hours a day in the fields, breathing toxic smoke," he says. Residents say more and more people are getting lung diseases and warn that if nothing changes, they will have to move away.

The same smoke reaches villages around Skopje. Rade Spasovski from Dolno Konjari says they have spent more than 50 days in smoke this year, collected 500 signatures and sent official letters to the government and the Ministry of Environment. They were promised the landfill would be cleaned up, but not when. The ministry went out to the site once and ordered the public utility to rehabilitate the landfill within 40 days. The fires carried on.

The utility says it is putting out the fire as best it can, but that a permanent solution and relocation of the landfill are for the municipality and the state to decide. The municipality, for its part, sees the permanent solution in a regional waste management system: a transfer station and a waste processing plant near Sveti Nikole, serving the Eastern and North-Eastern regions. The tender documentation has been sent to the EU Office, and they are waiting for an opinion.

"Right now, all we can do is buy time," Dimitrievski said. Residents put it differently. "We don't see a solution in two days of machines and soil," says Ilievski, who wants the problem solved at a higher level. When the utility waits for the municipality, the municipality waits for the EU, and the ministry sets deadlines nobody keeps - who exactly is carrying the burden, apart from the people doing the breathing?

Bought time has a price. Seven villages and their lungs are paying it, while the plant near Sveti Nikole is still a folder on somebody's desk.