Firefighters bring blaze under control near Konjic as local resources face severe strain

"The situation this morning is much better than yesterday. During the night, all our firefighting teams were on the ground and managed to bring the fire under control, so now we have a much better situation than it was yesterday," Hodzic stated.

The emergency response saw the immediate mobilization of all available municipal resources, despite concurrent fires burning across multiple locations within the municipality. "All the teams we had, we engaged them immediately during yesterday, even though we have several other fires in the area of our municipality. We organized ourselves quickly and we had a lot of people there, besides the firefighters themselves, volunteers, our other services dealing with protection and rescue," he explained, noting the crucial contribution of local residents who joined the firefighting efforts.

Protecting residential and commercial infrastructure remained the primary operational objective. "What was most important was to save the buildings, considering that there are a lot of houses nearby, there were a lot of business facilities, and fortunately we succeeded there," Hodzic emphasized. While an aerial firefighting response via helicopter was initially requested when the blaze threatened nearby properties, the overnight stabilization of the fire rendered those resources unnecessary.

The fire severely impacted the local landscape, destroying a stretch of the railway corridor measuring approximately 400 meters and charring an entire hill overlooking the town. "In this moment it is very difficult, but the fact that the complete railway belt, somewhere around 400 meters, was burned in a short time and the complete hill was burning, so that is really an ugly sight to see, considering that it enters the town itself and that these are in some way the lungs of the town," Hodzic remarked. He warned that recurring fires along the railway corridor, driven by steep and inaccessible terrain, require a higher level of preventive measures from entities operating in the area.

Repovica remains only one of several active fire fronts in Konjic, with crews deployed continuously to Bitovina mountain, Glavaticevo near Ratkamen, and Bjelimici in the village of Ljubuca. Although local authorities have invested heavily in equipment in recent years, Hodzic stressed that managing multiple large-scale fires simultaneously exceeds the capacity of any single local government. "When you have a fire in five different locations in one day, it surpasses all the capacities of a local community, no matter how equipped it is," he concluded, calling for strengthened firefighting capabilities at the federal level.