Residents evacuate as Belgium wildfire scorches 1,600 hectares

Residents evacuate as Belgium wildfire scorches 1,600 hectares 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. 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.