The Croatian Mountain Rescue Service pulled off a dramatic overnight operation in the Čikola canyon near Drniš, saving a man who had spent nearly ten hours wedged upside down between two rocks in temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. The mission, which concluded at 22:30, hinged on a drone operator who located the missing man in a steep crevice beneath the town’s fortress after traditional search methods proved difficult in the rugged terrain.
The rescue began when HGSS’s Šibenik station received an alert from the national 112 emergency center about a missing person in the area around the Čikola river canyon. Fifteen rescue specialists deployed with two drones and were joined by five volunteer firefighters from the Drniš Volunteer Fire Department. Because the terrain was extremely inaccessible, teams attacked the search from three angles simultaneously, drone operators scanned from above, rope technicians rappelled down the canyon cliffs, and a ground team searched the dry riverbed. The drone operator eventually spotted the victim suspended head down between rocks. Given the time he had been missing, rescuers estimated he had been trapped in that position for roughly ten hours, exposed to extreme heat.
The extraction was complex. A rescue team descended to the man with a stretcher and first aid equipment, immobilized him, and prepared him for evacuation while a second crew installed hauling systems on higher ground to winch both the victim and rescuers to safety. Throughout the operation, the drone provided aerial illumination, allowing the teams to work more securely in the dark canyon. The man was eventually transferred to an emergency medical crew for further treatment.
For the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service, the successful outcome validated years of investment in drone technology. The organization, which has conducted roughly 9,000 rescues since its founding and has pioneered unmanned aerial systems since 2013, has found that drones can reduce response times by at least a quarter compared to traditional methods in difficult terrain. As HGSS noted in a statement after the rescue, operations like this one give meaning to every hour of training, “Yesterday everything coincided at the right moment. The result is a man who got a new chance at life.”
