13.5-Meter Pine Tree Falls on Crikvenica Beach, Eight Hurt

A tree came down on sunbathers at the city beach Balustrada in Crikvenica, on the northern Adriatic, on Sunday morning, injuring eight people. None of them are Serbian nationals: the Primorje-Gorski Kotar Police Department listed four Croatian and four Czech citizens among the injured, including three children. For Serbian tourists currently on the Kvarner coast, the story carries real weight, because the accident did not happen in a forest or on a wild stretch of shoreline. It happened on a maintained public beach kept up under a routine municipal program, on a Sunday at midday, at the peak of the busiest part of the season.

The report of a falling tree in front of a hotel reached police at around 11:10 a.m. on Sunday, August 9, 2026. A pine tree 13.5 meters tall snapped at the root and fell across a section of the beach where sun loungers and bathers were positioned. Everyone caught under the tree freed themselves before police and other emergency services arrived. The injuries were surface wounds and scrapes, and the injured were taken as a precaution to the Rijeka Clinical Hospital Center (KBC Rijeka), from where they were released after examination. There was no material damage.

Eko-Murvica, the utility company that maintains Crikvenica’s beaches, said its crews went to the scene immediately and that the circumstances of the fall would be established together with relevant experts and services. In the same statement, the company described the limits of the very oversight it carries out.

“Certain root damage and the risk of a tree uprooting cannot always be determined through regular visual inspection.”

That sentence narrows in advance the scope of what has been announced. Specialized instruments exist for assessing the internal condition of a trunk, including a resistograph, but even such testing, according to the company, does not deliver an absolute guarantee.

Why did the tree snap at the root?

The tree in question is an Aleppo pine, a species that naturally develops a relatively shallow root system. According to Eko-Murvica, the stability of mature trees of this species is affected by prolonged drought and by soil and terrain characteristics. Balustrada beach sits on landfill terrain, which adds another factor: roots in fill soil do not have the same anchoring as roots in undisturbed ground, so the load of the crown is carried by a connection weaker than it appears from the surface. Photos from the scene show exactly that kind of break, with an uprooted root and a dark, decayed section at the base of the trunk.

What comes after the announced inspection

Eko-Murvica has announced an additional inspection of trees on Balustrada beach and on other high-traffic public areas, to determine which ones need further expert assessment or other measures. The open question is not whether the inspection will take place, but how far it will go: whether it stops at visual checks, whose limits the company itself has already acknowledged, or whether, after this incident, it moves to instrumental measurement on trees of the same species and in similar positions.

The timing is unfavorable. Crikvenica is currently marking City Day and the feast of Velika Gospa, so the inspection and any potential tree removal fall on a week when the beaches are at their fullest and any closure of part of the shoreline is felt the most. The company said the public would be informed of all established facts and measures taken, without giving a date.

The same risk does not stop at one municipality’s border. Trees planted on filled and paved coastal surfaces face the same sequence of conditions, drought and shallow roots in fill soil, and their safety is typically checked by looking from the ground, until a fall like this one happens. The findings from the Crikvenica company, once complete, will be the first concrete data point on how much that method is actually worth.