Hellish heat and primal fear: Croatian firefighters on frontline of climate crisis

Ashort drive from the tourist-thronged old town of Split, but a world away from the retirees clambering out of cruise ships and stag parties stumbling into beachside bars, Ivan Sanader studied a smouldering hillside that stank of smoke.

The night before, he had fought a fire that charred the slope and threatened to engulf a roadside restaurant. Now, the commander of a mobile firefighter centre in Croatia was issuing orders to stop it flaring back up.

“It looks like the end of the world,” said Sanader, furrowing his sweat-lined brow and standing beside a fire engine with a freshly melted bumper, “but for us it’s just part of the job.”

The firefighters saving the sunstruck coasts of southern Europe from flames say keeping a cool head is key to their work. But some say the decision to join the ranks was a result of following their hearts instead of their heads.

Sanader and his colleagues rush toward roaring infernos that can cut off escape routes with a flick of the wind. They work on rugged terrain that is often inaccessible to vehicles, strapping bags of water on to their backs and hiking up hills in punishing heat.

The landscape is filled with pine trees whose sap burns “like gasoline” and whose cones “act like grenades”, one firefighter said, with hot winds carrying flaming seed cases over roads and setting safe stretches of forest alight.

The stress of the job has been compounded by the carbon pollution heating up Europe and drying out parts of it, increasing the fuel load on which fires thrive. Three firefighters died battling blazes in Portugal last month and another died fighting floods in Austria.

“Climate change has affected every part of the job,” said Slavko Tucaković, Croatia’s chief firefighter.

From the island of Brač, firefighters watched the red-hot hills near Split in late August with concern for their colleagues. In 2007, a fire tornado on the Kornati archipelago killed 12 firefighters and severely injured another, the deadliest event in the country’s firefighting history. Four years later, Brač was hit by what remains Croatia’s biggest ever wildfire. Then in 2017 a fire ripped through the woods near Split and came close to scorching its suburbs.

On first ask, the firefighters are stoic about the risks they face and uncomfortable with people describing their duties as heroic. But when pressed, they tell stories of hellish heat.

Nikola Martinić Peruzzo, who leads the island’s fire service from the tourist town of Supetar, said he and his team were once encircled by flames after a wind shift foiled their exit plan. With fire closing in, they wrapped a hose several times around the edge of their truck, shut the nozzle, and crouched low to the ground as pressure built in the tube.

When the blaze began to lick the edges, he said, they punctured the hose with screwdrivers to unleash a wall of cool water. It kept the team alive for a precious few minutes in which planes arrived to drop water and clear a path.

“It’s a primal fear,” said Peruzzo, who has been encircled a few times in his career. “You see how little you are in front of nature.”

The economic shift is particularly acute on Brač, an island the size of Malta that imports its water and whose population swells fourfold in summer. The fire service cannot rely on reinforcements from the mainland, and the wildfire in 2011 forced it to change tactics.

“Now we extinguish fires like blitzkrieg,” said Peruzzo. The strategy involves hitting the fires hard from the air, supported by a large but nimble mass of ground forces. “It looks like overkill,” said his deputy, Jakov Zlatar, but their statistics show it cuts costs by reducing the risk of big fires that take days to extinguish.

The Split fire in 2017 proved even more transformative. It resulted in a reform of the Croatian fire service that has cut red tape to the point that firefighting planes can be sent out in minutes. “Firefighting has been elevated to a pillar of homeland security,” Tucaković said.

Convincing other people to join their ranks is one of the tougher jobs firefighters face. The number of professional firefighters in Europe has hovered at about 365,000 in recent years, even as the need for them has grown, and firefighter unions in countries such as Croatia and Greece protested this year over low pay.

The firefighters in Supetar, most of whom have family ties to the service, say they rely on side hustles such as driving taxis and programming websites to make ends meet. In August, the Croatian government agreed to raise firefighter salaries and introduce a minimum wage.

Stamping out sexism could help the recruitment drive in the sector, where more than three-quarters of workers are men. “In some teams, you go on an intervention and people will just look at you and say ‘who are these girls’,” said Valentina Kišan, a speech pathologist and volunteer firefighter on a temporary placement in Supetar. Ana Ilinić, an economist and fellow volunteer, said the situation was improving but varied from team to team.

Supetar’s fire service received a welcome boost in 1994 when British firefighters donated sorely needed equipment during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. The charity-run project known as Operation Florian has since spread to fire services around the world, while fire-prone Supetar has hosted firefighters used to colder climates. It plans to train British firefighters for the first time next year.

Anja Mrak, a volunteer firefighter from Slovenia, who in 2022 worked through her country’s worst wildfire in decades, said the job was rewarding but came with a mental burden. “That [fire] was really emotional. Some people you had to rescue didn’t want to leave their houses.”

To cope with the psychological demands of the job, the firefighters say they have learned the importance of talking through negative experiences. The Croatian fire service offers them support from psychologists, and the commanders in Supetar organise team-building activities every two weeks to help them build trust and let off steam.

When facing a fire, said Peruzzo, “we say it doesn’t matter what’s in front of you. What matters is who is beside you.”

Cover photo: By The Guardian