August the 30th, 2022 - Fifteen whole years have passed since the devastating Kornati tragedy took the lives of twelve out of the 23 firefighters sent to the island of Kornat to battle the wildfires that had broken out there on the 30th of August, 2007.
A series of horrendous wildfires broke out between June the 1st and August the 8th, 2007, and the period is even referred to as the 2007 Croatian coast fires. The fire which broke out on the island of Kornat, part of the heavily visited Kornati National Park, became the horrific scene of the worst Croatian firefighting accident in the history of firefighting in this country.
As Morski writes, twelve tremendously brave and selfless firefighters lost their lives either at the scene on the island of Kornat, or died later on when in hospital. The only survivor at that time was 23-year-old Frane Lucic from Tisno.
In Vodice, the commemoration of another sad anniversary of the Kornati tragedy began with a parade of local fire brigades. The pilots of the 855th firefighting squadron of the HRZ also paid their respects to the firefighters with a canadair flight over the town, writes HRT.
At the monument to the victims, a model of the helicopter that flew over the Kornati National Park on the fateful day, as well as the black box from that aircraft, which was subsequently lost, were placed.
''Our message that we wanted to showcase with this is that the black box was removed from the helicopter and was lost on the day of the accident and it has still not be found, fifteen years have now passed and the question arises as to why it even disappeared in the first place,'' said Matija-Karlo Valincic, president of the Vodice Fire Brigade.
Some of the families of the fallen firefighters who lost their lives to the fire that day still think that they were doused with kerosene from a helicopter. Officially, according to experts, the Kornati tragedy was caused by different versions of a "rare natural phenomenon" - an eruptive fire, the combustion of an inhomogeneous gas mixture and a fire with an eruptive effect. In the case against former fire chief Drazen Slavica, the court rejected the possibility that the firefighters died due to the effects of kerosene. In the meantime, Slavica has been legally acquitted and will now sue the state.
Despite the passage of time and the chances of getting answers seeming to get further and further away as the clock ticks, the families whose lives have been stuck in summer 2007 ever since the Kornati tragedy aren't giving up on their search for the truth and for justice. They have jointly submitted a constitutional complaint and requests to the European Court of Human Rights.
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