Residents evacuate as Belgium wildfire scorches 1,600 hectares
This photograph shows smoke billowing from a scorched area during a wildfire in the Hautes Fagnes (High Fens) nature reserve in Jalhay on Aug 15, 2026. Residents began evacuating from two villages in eastern Belgium on Aug 15, 2026 as firefighters, backed by water bombers and helicopters from across Europe, battled one of the biggest wildfires in the country’s history. Reinforcements from across the country were fighting the blaze which broke out on Aug 14, 2026 in the High Fens (Hautes Fagnes) natural park, a vast wood- and heathland popular with hikers near the German border, and quickly expanded. (Photo: Laurent Cavenati/Belga via AFP)
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BRUSSELS: The European Union deployed three helicopters and two water bomber aircraft to tackle a record wildfire in eastern Belgium, the bloc’s crisis commissioner said on Saturday (Aug 15), as local authorities told residents in some villages to leave their homes.
The blaze in the High Fens, Belgium’s largest nature reserve, has been burning since Friday and local firefighters, farmers and the army have sought to contain it.
By early Saturday afternoon, it had burned 1,600 hectares, a spokesperson for the administration of the Wallonia region in Belgium told Reuters.
That makes the fire the biggest on record in Belgium, surpassing a blaze in 2011 that burned nearly 1,400 hectares, data from the European Forest Fire Information System showed.
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The office of the governor of Liege province asked residents in parts of two municipalities to evacuate their homes on Saturday afternoon, due to changing winds and smoke in the area. Tourists staying in the area were advised to leave.
Local authorities told residents in the village of Sourbrodt to also prepare for a possible evacuation. A children’s summer camp in the region was already being evacuated, Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken said in a post on X.
European countries including Belgium suffered their fifth heatwave of the summer this week. Scientists say human-caused climate change has increased the likelihood of the hot and dry conditions that allow wildfires to spread faster and burn longer.
The EU coordinates the deployment of extra resources pooled from European countries, when a country requests emergency help. The aircraft sent to Belgium on Saturday were from the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands, EU Crisis Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said in a post on X.
Source: Reuters/fs
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