Batajnica Fire: Firefighters Rescue Family Through Window

A fire broke out around four o’clock this morning in a family house on Klisina Street, in Batajnica, a Belgrade neighborhood. The flames started in a ground-floor room while a husband, wife and their small child were asleep upstairs. Batajnica sits in the northwest of Belgrade, on the right bank of the Danube, and is built up mostly with single and two-story family homes, much like the one where the fire started.

Flames and thick smoke quickly filled the internal staircase, the only way down to the front door. That left the family of three cut off on the upper floor, directly above the burning room, with no way to get out on their own. Smoke spreads faster than fire in situations like this, so every minute that passed cut further into the time firefighters had to work with.

“The husband, wife and child were trapped upstairs. They couldn’t get out because of the fire and the smoke, and their lives were in danger.”

That is how a source familiar with the operation described the drama of that night, in a statement to Kurir. According to the same source, firefighters reached the scene within minutes of the call and quickly established that the ground-floor room was on fire and that two adults and a child were trapped upstairs. That assessment on the ground shaped how the rest of the operation played out.

Crews split into two groups. One stayed on the ground floor to fight the fire and keep it from spreading upward while the rescue was underway. The other headed straight for the upper floor, carrying equipment to bring people out through a window rather than down the smoke-filled stairs.

Firefighters ran ladders up to the upstairs window and used them to bring the family out before the smoke could do them harm. The order of evacuation followed who was in the greatest danger: the child came out first, then the father, and the mother last.

All three reached safety without a single injury, despite having been cut off from the house’s only exit just moments earlier. By the time everyone was outside, smoke had already filled most of the floor where the family had been sleeping.

“Right now, the most important thing is that the people were saved,” the source familiar with the operation told Kurir.

With the family safe, the firefighters who had stayed on the ground floor kept working to put the fire out. It was brought under control soon after, which kept it from spreading to the rest of the house or to neighboring buildings on the same street. Part of the crew remained on site even after the fire was out, to cool down the burned area and make sure it didn’t flare up again.

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined. An on-scene investigation was underway, and the exact cause of the blaze in the ground-floor room is expected to come from the forensic examination that typically follows this kind of intervention. The extent of the damage to the house had also not been precisely reported at the time of publication, since the investigation took priority over assessing the material damage.

For now, based on what is known, the one certainty is that everyone in the household walked away unhurt, thanks to the quick response from firefighters and the split operation they carried out that night on Klisina Street.