Hvar Battles Two Wildfires in a Single Day
Fire on Smokovnik hill above Hvar was contained within an hour, then flames broke out that afternoon in Vira cove, pulling the Canadair plane off the Brac wildfire.
The island of Hvar had two separate wildfires break out on the same day, Thursday, August 13, and the second was serious enough that a firefighting plane was pulled off the neighboring island of Brac and flown across the channel. Croatia’s wildfire season had already been drawing coverage in Serbia before that, since the tally since the start of the year is grim: 8,832 fires and 23 dead as of January 1.
The first call came in at 11:25, from Smokovnik hill near the town of Hvar. Scrub was burning on hilly terrain, the low, dense Mediterranean vegetation that catches fast under the August sun and is hard to reach on foot. Three island volunteer fire brigades responded: DVD Hvar with five vehicles, DVD Stari Grad with two, and DVD Jelsa with one, 18 firefighters and eight vehicles in total, backed by one firefighting plane in the air.
The response was brief. The fire was under control by around 12:00, and by 12:20 it had been declared contained, less than an hour after the first call.
Why was the Canadair plane pulled off Brac?
That same afternoon, a new fire was reported on Hvar, in the area of Vira cove, where forest was burning. Because of it, the Canadair CL-415, which had until then been working the fire on the island of Brac, was redirected to Hvar.
The decision makes sense given what it left behind. At the Brac fire site, in the Pucisca area, firefighting continued with reinforcements: Croatia’s Ministry of Defense (MORH) sent two Air Tractor AT-802 planes, and a Mi-171Sh helicopter was also deployed to ferry firefighters and equipment toward Pucisca. Neither fire site was left without air support, but the aircraft assignments shifted through the day depending on where the fire was most dangerous at any given moment.
All told, four aircraft were moving between the two islands that day: one Canadair CL-415, two Air Tractor AT-802s, and one transport helicopter. That was all that was available for two active fire sites, so every new report meant a fresh call on who fought what fire and when.
Hvar’s firefighters posted their own footage of the drive to the fire site and the firefighting effort, showing the conditions on the ground: rocky access roads, scrub right up to the track, and smoke clinging to the slope. At Smokovnik, air support arrived quickly, so the ground crews’ job stayed within what eight vehicles could handle.
What this means for the rest of the season
The Dalmatian islands have been in the same position all summer: a small number of permanent firefighting crews on the ground, terrain that vehicles cannot reach everywhere, and reliance on aircraft shared between multiple fire sites. When two islands burn on the same day, the planes get assigned by priority, leaving one fire site temporarily covered only by crews on the ground.
The speed of the response at Smokovnik shows the other side of that equation: a fire caught within the first hour stays a local story, while one that gets away becomes part of statistics like the ones in the opening paragraph. On Hvar, the difference between those two outcomes was measured in minutes.
The Adriatic fire season runs into the fall, and August and early September are typically when the largest number of interventions are recorded. Pucisca on Brac remains an open fire site with reinforced air support, and the decisions on where to send the aircraft there are still being made day by day.
