A wildfire burning roughly 30 square kilometers in eastern Belgium has become the country's largest on record, forcing some 600 residents from their homes and drawing emergency crews from across Europe.
The fire tore through the High Fens nature reserve in Liège province, near the German border, burning more than twice the area of a 2011 blaze that had held Belgium's previous record. By Sunday morning, more than 250 emergency personnel, including over 100 Belgian and German firefighters, police, military officers, and civil protection staff, were on the ground trying to hold the line against a fire that officials said was still spreading through terrain almost impossible to reach.
Liège provincial governor Hervé Jamar confirmed the deployment figures in a statement Sunday. Authorities had ordered roughly 600 residents in the nearby municipalities of Waimes and Bütgenbach to evacuate Saturday after shifting winds pushed heavy smoke toward populated areas. Tourists were told to leave. A gymnasium was opened to shelter those displaced. As of Sunday morning, authorities said no homes had been damaged, but the fire remained dangerously close to residential zones, the Associated Press reported.
The High Fens is a mix of heathland and peat bogs, terrain that burns deep and resists standard firefighting tactics. Nicolas Yernaux, a spokesperson for the Public Service of Wallonia, the regional government body, put it bluntly.
"We're dealing with something much deeper because we have very dry soil."
Weeks of unusually hot, dry weather set the stage. Temperatures hit roughly 37°C, about 99°F, in parts of Belgium on Friday. The combination of baked-out peat and open heathland turned the reserve into fuel.
René Dahmen, chief engineer at Belgium's Department of Nature and Forest, described an eastern flank where the fire was creeping toward a municipal forest along a front at least a kilometer long.
"On the eastern flank, there's a line at least a kilometer long where the fire is slowly advancing toward a municipal forest. That's the first priority now; we deployed resources last night, and the firefighters are ready, in case it gets too close."
Dahmen did not sugarcoat the situation.
"The situation is extremely difficult. We need helicopter support."
Belgium activated the European Union's civil protection mechanism, a formal request system that lets member states pool emergency resources, to bring in international reinforcements. Sweden sent two water-bombing aircraft. The Netherlands dispatched two firefighting helicopters. The Czech Republic contributed one helicopter. German firefighters joined the ground effort alongside their Belgian counterparts.
EU Commissioner Hadja Lahbib, who oversees crisis management, posted on X:
"The High Fens are burning. Belgium is not facing it alone."
Belgian federal police also operated their own firefighting helicopters. The multinational response reflected the scale of a fire that had, by Sunday, surpassed the 2011 High Fens fire that burned nearly 14 square kilometers, roughly 5.4 square miles, which European Forest Fire Information System data had listed as Belgium's largest wildfire on record.
German authorities in the border town of Monschau warned Sunday that the Belgian fire had advanced to within roughly 1.5 kilometers, just under a mile, of the German border. The proximity added urgency to an already stretched response.
Belgium was not the only country fighting fire. The same punishing heat and drought conditions drove blazes across the region.
In Germany's Hürtgen forest, near the city of Düren, a separate wildfire forced roughly 2,000 residents of the village of Gey to evacuate on Friday. They were allowed to return Saturday evening after firefighters made significant progress. By Sunday morning, Düren local authorities said no open flames remained in the area, and crews had surrounded the burn zone with a cleared cordon about 3 meters, roughly 10 feet, wide to prevent further spread.
In southwestern France, firefighters in the Landes region battled a blaze that burned approximately 17 square kilometers of pine forest and forced some 650 people to evacuate. Landes Prefect Gilles Clavreul said crews faced no major flare-ups overnight. Earlier in the summer, a massive fire in France's Gironde department had scorched roughly 420 square kilometers and forced an estimated 220,000 people from their homes.
Across the English Channel, emergency crews in South Wales fought 14 wildfires with military support. In England's West Midlands, fires gutted more than a dozen homes during the week. Britain recorded its hottest day of the year on Thursday at 38.1°C, about 100.6°F. Two people died in a wildfire on the Greek island of Salamina, west of Athens, where near gale-force winds drove rapid spread, AP News reported.
As of Sunday, Belgian authorities had not reported any injuries or fatalities from the High Fens fire. No homes had been damaged. But the fire's cause remained unknown, and no containment percentage had been released, two gaps that leave the public guessing about how much worse things could get.
Authorities urged people to stay away from the fire zone, warning that unnecessary traffic could block emergency vehicles and slow firefighting operations. The plea underscored a basic reality: the fire was not under control.
The discrepancy in official figures told its own story. Some reports placed the burned area at over 27 square kilometers; others put it at roughly 30. Either number dwarfs the 2011 record. And with dry soil burning deep beneath the surface, the kind of fire that looks contained on the surface can reignite from below.
When a nature reserve the size of a small city goes up in smoke and four countries have to send aircraft just to keep the fire from jumping a national border, the scale of the emergency speaks for itself. The question now is whether the response can outpace conditions that show no sign of letting up.
