Firefighters find body after house fire near Vrbas
The fire in Savino Selo broke out around 2:45 a.m. on Branka Radicevica Street and tore through two rooms of a single-storey house. When it was put out at 5:15 a.m., a body was found in one of them.
A single-storey family house on Branka Radicevica Street in Savino Selo, near Vrbas, burned for two and a half hours overnight. The fire started around 2:45 a.m., in the night between July 30 and July 31, and was put out at 5:15 a.m. Working through the gutted rooms, firefighters found a body in one of them.
The callout was handled by the Vrbas fire and rescue unit. The crew was small and the fire was already well ahead of them when they pulled up.
- three fire and rescue officers and two vehicles on scene
- flames had taken hold of two rooms on the ground floor
- roughly 50 square meters of the building burned
- about two and a half hours passed between the alarm and the all clear
The unit described what it found on arrival as a fire “in a fully developed phase, with flames coming out through the windows of the building”. That is the wording crews use once burning has broken out of the enclosed space and pushed through openings in the facade.
Two rooms and fifty square meters
Two rooms burned. The house has no upper floor, so the fire spread across a single level. The tally is about 50 square meters of scorched space.
The body was found only after the fire was brought under control, in one of the rooms that had burned. Crews knocked the flames down first and saw what was inside afterwards. That order matters, because it explains why the first reports from the scene carried no mention of a fatality.
Containment and extinguishing are not the same thing. Containment means the fire has stopped spreading and can be surrounded; extinguishing means nothing inside is still burning. In Savino Selo enough time passed between those two points for the rooms to be searched. The official time the fire was out is 5:15 a.m.
What is known about the cause?
Officially, nothing. The cause is being established through an on-scene investigation, and that is a job for the police and the prosecution, not for the fire service. Until that investigation and the forensic examination are finished, any claim about what set the house alight is guesswork.
Investigations into fires of this kind normally involve an examination of the burn site, pinpointing where the fire started, and a forensic report. It is the expert finding that eventually answers whether the cause was a technical fault, carelessness or something else.
The identity of the person who died has not been officially released. Nor has it been said whether that person lived in the house, or how many residents were registered at the address. Under standard practice, a name is published only once the authorities confirm the identity and the family has been notified.
A village that has halved in sixty years
Savino Selo sits in the municipality of Vrbas, in the South Backa District of Vojvodina. At the 2022 census it had 2,562 residents. Sixty years earlier, in 1961, 5,144 people lived there.
That figure is not decoration. Fires in the villages around Vrbas are answered by the unit based in the municipal seat, as this one was. When a house goes up after midnight in a place like this, everything hinges on how many people are on shift that night and how long the drive out takes. This time three firefighters went, with two vehicles.
The fire was out by 5:15 a.m. Everything else, who died and why the house burned, now belongs to the investigation.
