Working meeting on this year’s fire-fighting season

 

The Director of the National Protection and Rescue Directorate Jadran Perinić and CEO of the Aeronautical Technical Centre Darko Cigrovski with his associates also attended the meeting.

In this year’s season from 15 May to 24 September, CAF Air Force participated in extinguishing of 349 fire sites. This is the largest number of interventions in one season since the fire-fighting statistics has been established.

During this period, more than 2400 flying hours were conducted. Of these, more than 1850 hours were achieved directly in fire-fighting, fire reconnaissance and in transporting forces and material resources to fight fires. It was spent nearly 1.3 million litres of fuel and thrown 58111 tons of water. Most fire sites were in the Split-Dalmatia County, 113 of them.

Ground forces were engaged in July and August, for three times in every month. The air force was engaged five times abroad, in Greece, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Major Davor Turković, Fire-fighting Squadron Commander, in the analysis of fire-fighting season said that the readiness of equipment and maintenance level was extremely satisfying, regardless of its intensive use, and that cooperation with Aeronautical Technical Centre was further improved: “Never before aircraft were coming from the inspection and maintenance in the right time”.

Great credit for the success of this year’s fire-fighting season goes to aircraft technicians who have performed 4071 pre-flight, after-flight and inter-flight inspection, and 54 periodic inspections carried out every 50, 100 and 200 flight hours, conducting 469 corrective interventions on planes.

Defence Minister thanked and paid tribute to everyone who participated in the fire-fighting season. “The season has been tough. An excellent job have been done, which was hard and responsible”, and added that this meeting could be considered as the beginning of preparations for the next fire-fighting season. “I think this is the beginning of preparations for the next fire-fighting season in which I hope to be fewer fires”.

Kotromanović on this occasion again pointed out the necessity of rational use of funds, where the potential savings would be invested in infrastructure, training, and improving the living and working conditions of CAF members.

“The job was done very efficiently”, General Lovrić said, and thanked all those who were involved in extinguishing fires.

Director of NPRD Perinić noted that we could be satisfied with what was done. “Our common task is to ensure maximum safety of citizens when it comes to the dangers of fire”, Perinić said, and concluded that this season we gained further valuable experience. “There will be always a threat of fire, we do not know when, but we have to continuously train and be ready at all times to react”.

 

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