One Firefighter per 1,865 Residents: Serbia Short by 3,000

Serbia has about 5,000 firefighters, and to cover the entire country to European standard, it would need roughly 3,000 more. The estimate comes from Vladimir Jakovljevic, a professor at the Faculty of Security Studies in Belgrade, made at a moment when those same crews have spent days fighting fires in Deliblatska Pescara and at Stolovi near Kraljevo, where flames have burned through more than 1,500 hectares of forest and low brush.

The makeup of that workforce is well documented. The Emergency Situations Sector of the Ministry of Interior employs about 3,500 professional firefighter rescuers, backed by roughly 1,500 members of volunteer fire units. Those figures come from the State Audit Institution, in a report published a year and a half ago, and they remain the baseline against which staffing levels are measured today.

The same report yields the ratio that best explains the scale of the gap. In Serbia, one firefighter rescuer serves 1,865 residents. The European standard is one per thousand.

Why doesn’t the annual hiring round close the gap?

Because people leave the service at almost the same pace they join it. A hiring round is held every year, and roughly 300 new firefighters complete training, but once that number is spread across the whole country, it gets absorbed, as Jakovljevic puts it. Meanwhile, part of the workforce retires, so each new generation is largely spent filling vacancies rather than growing the overall headcount.

Jakovljevic told Nova ekonomija that the shortage is not a one off this year but something that shows up in reports year after year:

“There are never enough firefighters… It’s a standing finding. If you follow the reports, you’ll see the personnel numbers keep coming up short.”

His assessment goes a step further: when an open area catches fire, as in Deliblatska Pescara, regular forces are not enough, so other structures get called in as well, chiefly the Serbian Army. That is exactly what happened this summer.

What it looks like on the ground

Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said four helicopters and heavy machinery were deployed to the worst hit parts of the Deliblatska Pescara fire, with strong, shifting winds making the firefighting harder by the hour. The MUP’s helicopter unit, he said, has been operating from the air around the clock.

“Behind every helicopter pass, every meter defended and every line firefighters hold, there are people who have spent days working under extremely difficult conditions. They are tired. But they don’t stop. Because this job has no pause as long as there’s fire,” Dacic said.

The line about a job with no pause and the figure of one firefighter per 1,865 residents are two sides of the same coin. When there are fewer people than the standard calls for, longer shifts become the substitute for headcount.

At Stolovi near Kraljevo, the fire spread below the village of Sosanica, pushed by strong wind. Reinforced crews from the Emergency Situations Sector and the MUP’s helicopter unit were on site, along with workers from “Srbijasume” and “Koridori Srbije,” volunteer fire brigades, volunteers and local residents. The list of participants is itself telling: the longer a fire burns, the more it comes to depend on people who are not employed by the fire service.

This continues a story we reported on when the Deliblatska Pescara fire had grown to 1,500 hectares. Back then, the question was how much longer it would burn. Now the question is who will fight the next one, since a shortage of 3,000 people is not closed by a season. It is closed by the number of positions the state opens in the next hiring round.