Much as there were those who strained the resources of Bulgaria’s Civil Protection Service by ignoring warnings against driving during the recent heavy snowfalls, the Mountain Rescue Service is being hard-pressed by those who pay no heed to avalanche warnings or to reminders not to ski or snowboard outside marked zones.

In recent days, recklessness of this kind – including by professionals who clearly, like the motorists who got themselves and the rescue services into difficulties, ignored sage warnings not to gamble against the potentially fatal odds when the mountains are ripe for avalanches.

In at least one incident, a rescue team that went up a mountain near Bansko reportedly was itself put at severe risk of falling victim to an ensuing avalanche.

When Bulgaria’s resorts offer a range of slopes of varying degrees of difficulty, including black slopes, it is beyond comprehension why anyone would endanger their own lives and those of others by seeking thrills through over-confident exhibitions of their supposed skills.

It is little wonder that Mountain Rescue is speaking of the need for severe penalties for those caught transgressing outside the marked areas. It seems that public warnings, and prominent media reports of those who have fallen foul of the perils of the mountains, are not enough to discourage the reckless.

The situation is complicated further by apparent inefficiencies in the operation of Bulgaria’s 112 emergency service. In a recent incident, a false alarm about the need for a mountain rescue was raised through a linguistic misunderstanding, an episode that wasted the time and resources of rescuers and, no less importantly, meant that the person in need of medical treatment had to wait unduly.

This episode brought forth, as The Sofia Echo has reported in recent days, other problems in the responsiveness of emergency services. While some have argued that emergency services cannot be expected to understand every foreign language, the fact is that a major objective in setting up an EU-wide emergency number was to make it reasonably accessible to all the bloc’s citizens, and through the wide range of languages in which it should be available, to many tourists and travellers from outside the Union visiting EU countries.

The "lost in translation" episode in Pamporovo has exposed a weakness in the emergency number system, and one that must be fixed. Not only because if each country is to be able to respond only in its own language or languages, there can be little point in having an EU-wide system, but also because the next time could lead to a situation worse than a simple loss of time.