Fifteen open-air fires registered by 6pm. Twenty-three over the full twenty-four hours. These are not the numbers from some catastrophic year's report - this is an ordinary August Tuesday in Macedonia, as reported by the Crisis Management Centre.

The two most stubborn blazes were still burning tonight. One near the Vidus locality close to the village of Dragov Dol, in the municipality of Makedonski Brod, where low vegetation, low-growing forest and scrub are alight. The second is on Mount Ograzden, in the municipality of Novo Selo - there the flames first took hold of a landfill, then moved on to mixed degraded forest. The fire at the municipal landfill in Delcevo has been brought under control.

The list of extinguished fires is long and reads like a geography of the entire country: Blatec in Vinica, Sveta Petka in Stip, Gorenci in Centar Zupa, Bacinci in Kicevo, Miletino in Brvenica, Dolna Lesnica in Zelino, Slatina in Tearce, Trubarevo in Gazi Baba, Dolno Svilare in Saraj. The morning before that, the Sredorek neighbourhood in Kumanovo was burning too.

The landfills did not ignite on their own

Notice how many times the word "landfill" appears in that list. Delcevo. Novo Selo. Kriva Palanka. Aracinovo. This is not a forest fire triggered by dry vegetation and high temperatures - this is rubbish burning because somewhere nobody ever settled where and how it gets dumped. The fire then crosses into the forest and becomes an "open-air fire" in the statistics.

The official explanation is always the same: high temperatures, parched vegetation, a small ignition source that spreads fast. That is accurate. But parched vegetation does not set itself on fire, and a landfill that flares up for the fourth time in one week is not a weather event - it is somebody's unpaid bill for a dump nobody ever sorted out.

The firefighters and the crews on the ground did their job - of the 23 fires in twenty-four hours, twenty were put out. The question is not for them. The question is why the same country with the same summer temperatures is surprised all over again every single year, and how many more years have to pass before the landfills stop burning.