Fire Above Sutomore Brought Under Control
The blaze broke out around 5 a.m. on Golo Brdo and was contained before noon, the Bar Protection and Rescue Service said. Crews are staying on site on the fourth day of fires across Montenegro.
A fire that broke out around 5 a.m. on Golo Brdo above Sutomore has been contained, the Bar Protection and Rescue Service said. The flames were under control before noon, but firefighters have not left the site.
“Protection and Rescue Service crews were engaged in fighting the fire on Golo Brdo during the early morning hours. The fire has been brought under control, and Protection and Rescue Service members are still on duty at the location,” commander Aco Vulevic told Radio Bar and Bar Info.
Golo Brdo rises directly above the settlement, so the fire line on the slope sits over the rooftops themselves. Neither the Protection and Rescue Service nor the national Directorate reported any damaged buildings, injuries or evacuations.
A fourth day without a break
The Directorate for Protection and Rescue said on Saturday morning that this is the fourth consecutive day of interventions against fires in Montenegro. Every drone is in the air, and the situation, the Directorate says, changes by the hour.
The figures from the air show how much work the previous day took. On Friday, 369 tonnes of water were dropped on the fire zones, and military helicopters alone flew 130 sorties.
Directorate head Miodrag Besovic listed the active fires for public broadcaster TVCG:
“The current situation is that we have active fires in several municipalities. In Herceg Novi, Baosici, Bijela and Zelenika. As for Ulcinj, we also have active fires at several locations there, those being Vladimir, Klezna, Gac, Zoganje, Briska Gora and Dabza. We also have Kuside and Strmina in Niksic, Bar and Lisinj, which is already under control, and a fire reported this morning in Sutomore, Golo Brdo”
That list also shows how much of the force is committed elsewhere while Sutomore burns. “In Herceg Novi we currently have 27 trucks and 93 firefighters taking part in fighting those active fires. In Ulcinj we have 14 trucks and 66 firefighters,” Besovic said.
Why Bar is exposed right now
Sutomore lies in the municipality of Bar, and Bar is one of the most crowded places in the country at this moment. According to unofficial figures that local tourism boards send to the National Tourism Organisation of Montenegro every Thursday, 172,000 tourists were in the country on August 13, about 6 percent more than in the same period last year. The largest numbers are in Ulcinj, Budva, Herceg Novi and Bar.
Those are, in the same order, the municipalities burning today.
The same hill, more than once in two years
Golo Brdo above Sutomore is not a newcomer to the list. In late July this year firefighters worked the same hill, and commander Vulevic then asked for fresh aircraft sorties to be approved in the early morning hours and explained that crews were staying on site “as a precaution and because of the danger that the fire could flare up again.” In late July 2024, a fire on Golo Brdo burned low vegetation and firefighters saved the houses. In late August the same year, a fire that started near the former children’s resort in Sutomore spread toward Golo Brdo, with human activity cited as the cause.
What was circulating on social media
Serbian news sites ran footage on Saturday morning from the Instagram account 192.rs, captioned to say that the flames had reached close to houses and that the fire was spreading fast. Instagram dates those two posts to August 14, the day before the Golo Brdo fire was reported.
No official source has linked that footage to the fire reported on Saturday morning, and the Bar Protection and Rescue Service has not said that flames came close to houses that morning.
Two things that ended up in the same reports elsewhere are also worth separating. The fire above Sutomore is not the same fire as the one near Herceg Novi. Herceg Novi is some 60 kilometers from Bar as the crow flies, the flames there have held for days along Baosici, Bijela and Zelenika, and 93 firefighters are deployed there. On Golo Brdo the fire was reported on Saturday morning and was under control the same morning.
What remains is the watch on the ground. A contained fire is not an extinguished one, and in late July, on this same hill, the Protection and Rescue Service kept its crews in place precisely because of the danger of a flare-up.
