Last year, the Maramures Mountain Rescue Service – Salvamont rescued 477 people in 360 response actions, making Maramures a safe county for tourists, director of the Maramures County Mountain Rescue Public Service Dan Benga told a meeting with journalists and tour operators.

Of the total, 71 rescue operations took place in the mountains, with 153 Ukrainian citizens brought to safety.

„Tourism means safety and fast response. The Maramures County Mountain Rescue Public Service is a structure which, I’d say, is among Romania’s top mountain rescue structures due to the fact that we have 100% response rate. Unfortunately, tourism also means issues in the mountains and in difficult to access areas and that is what we, at the Maramures Mountain Rescue Service, are for as a professional mountain rescue structure of the County Council. (…) We were relatively recently established, in 2018, and since then we performed over 1,800 rescue actions, saving over 2,022 people which, from my point of view, is a significant number. Last year we had 360 response actions in Maramures, making it almost one per day, in which 477 people were saved. Also, we had 71 actions in the Maramures Mountains, where we saved 153 Ukrainians. What is happening in the neighboring country is tragic,” said Dan Benga.

In March 2025, a delegation of the Maramures County Mountain Rescue Public Service attended the „Rescue in Difficult Environment” International Forum in Genoa, Italy, where it gave the presentation „Three Years of War – Extreme Condition Rescues of Ukrainians in Romania’s Maramures Mountains”, which highlighted the difficult mountain rescue interventions for Ukrainian refugees.

„There are 60 of us in total, aspirants included. (…) This is a war that prompted many Ukrainians to flee, to cross the border, and in the past three years we, at Salvamont Maramures, have experienced some unprecedented and until then unimaginable situations. We’ve come against extremely difficult and highly dramatic situations, where we frantically worked against the clock in places we never thought we’d ever get to save someone,” Benga mentioned.

He stated that alone last year over 20,000 Ukrainians crossed the border into Romania through the Maramures Mountains.

„The number may seem small, but each of our interventions means 20-24-28-30 hours upwards. These are extremely difficult, extremely harsh areas, where winter temperatures plunge to minus 26 degrees. We have an extraordinary team, we are a professional mountain rescue structure of the Maramures County Council, which provides us with funding and equipment without which we would not have been able to get to the respective spots,” he concluded.

AGERPRES