The fire that since Friday has been affecting one of Belgium’s largest nature parks has already consumed nearly three thousand hectares and forced the evacuation of several localities, including in neighboring Germany, according to various sources.
The fire broke out in the middle of Friday afternoon in Les Fagnes, in the Hautes Fagnes-Eiffel Nature Park, in eastern Belgium, and, according to the authorities of the French-speaking Wallonia region, by mid-morning yesterday nearly three thousand hectares of forest had burned.
“The characteristics of the terrain in Hautes Fagnes make intervention particularly difficult and do not allow rescue services to fight the fire at close range in all locations with their usual means,” they added, in a statement cited by the Spanish news agency EFE.
In addition to ground resources, several aircraft are taking part in battling the flames, including two Swedish airplanes and two Czech and Dutch helicopters, activated under the European Civil Protection Mechanism, the European Commissioner responsible for coordinating the community mechanism said on Saturday on X.
Other aircraft may also arrive from Norway and Germany, Hadja Lahbib told the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).
During the last night, two localities were evacuated in Belgium and this morning the German town of Monschau, in the west of the country near the Belgian border, advised residents of three communities to leave their homes due to the smoke.
The Les Fagnes fire is already one of the largest in Belgium’s history and, according to AFP, was only a few dozen kilometres in a straight line from another fire in western Germany, which has since been brought under control, allowing 1,800 people to return home.
In France, a fire active for several days in the Les Landes province in the southwest of the country, in which at least 1,700 hectares burned, also began to yield today to the firefighters, due to the drop in temperatures, local governor Gilles Clavreul said.
In Croatia, where one person died and another 40 were injured in a fire that devastated the Omis region on the central coast, four people were detained by police on suspicion of arson linked to another large fire in the Zadar region, authorities announced today.
