The fire started from a bolt of lightning striking the ground.

The olive bushes rapidly caught fire. Each new tree catching brought out a very deep red flame. Over a period of about 10 minutes the flames spread out and down the hill towards the village of Razanj.

Soon the flames where lapping at the nearest houses to the fire.

Razanj is fairly isolated so we estimated that a fire engine would take about twenty minutes to get here, and much longer for the next tender which was more kilometres away.

The Croatian fire brigade howver use sea planes to bomb the fires in this type of case so within about 20 minutes two sea planes appeared and started bombing the fire.

Then they landied in the sea without stopping, scooping up more seawater, amd did another bombing run.

This went on for about 30-40 minutes, each plave doing about 25 runs at the flames.

The planes flew very low over the flames and were literally sometimes a few metres above the houses.

Vast clouds of steam rose into the sky on the inital hits.

All the crowds on the beach stopped to watch this ariel display.

Again and again the planes swooped over the flames, from different directions.

Once teh fire was out we could see how close the flames got to the nearest houses - right up to them. The area burnt out was about 1/2mile x 1/4 mile