Stories: SLOVENIA WILDFIRE 2022

The largest wildfire in the history of Slovenia started on July 17, 2022, in the hills above Renče in the Karst region of the country where it hasn't rained for months. After subsiding for a day it reignited and raged for a week, spreading across the border to Italy, moving back and forth, easing and reigniting into fiery infernos. Villages in the area were evacuated daily, but luckily all houses have been saved by the enormous efforts of over a thousand firefighters, most of them from volunteer fire brigades from all over the country. Also helping Slovenians were Italian firefighters and their firefighting helicopters, Austrian helicopters, Croatian and Italian Canadair firefighting aircrafts, a Slovak Black Hawk helicopter, Croatian fire brigades, Serbian helicopters... The area where the fire was burning is also scattered with unexploded WW1 grenades and mines, and they kept going off. It made firefighting much more difficult, but no fireman have been seriously injured. The fire eventually spread to an area larger than the entire surface area of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, but was nevertheless contained by over ten thousand of firefighters working day and night. It burned over 3500 hectares of the land. The fire started after months of no substantial rain or none at all in extremely dry forested hills as Slovenia was facing heat wave after heat wave for months. The fire raged at the peak of a record-breaking heat wave and the temperature in the area reached over 40 degrees Celsius.