Belgium turns to Europe for aerial support as the High Fens fire tests national capacity

Belgium has turned to European partners for aerial support as emergency crews continue fighting the wildfire that broke out on Friday, 14 August, in the High Fens in eastern Wallonia. Reporting by 7sur7 says the authorities are relying on Europe’s pooled firefighting capacity because Belgium has only limited aircraft equipped for sustained water-bombing operations. The precise foreign aircraft assigned, their arrival schedule and the fire’s current containment perimeter had not all been officially consolidated by Tuesday morning.

For residents around Waimes, Bütgenbach, Baelen and the wider province of Liège, the European request is more than an institutional detail. It determines how quickly crews can attack hot spots that ground teams cannot safely reach, particularly where peat continues to smoulder below the surface. The emergency also matters farther away: smoke travelled across parts of Wallonia, while access restrictions and evacuations disrupted communities and tourism near Belgium’s largest nature reserve.

The support is coordinated through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, whose Emergency Response Coordination Centre in Brussels matches a requesting country with aircraft and crews offered by participating states. The mechanism can draw on the European Civil Protection Pool and the rescEU reserve, with the European Commission helping to coordinate and finance deployment. It is an EU operation based in Brussels, not an intervention by the Brussels-Capital Region.

The Commission said before the 2026 fire season that Europe had assembled its largest seasonal wildfire response yet, combining aircraft, firefighters, Copernicus mapping and forecasts from the European Forest Fire Information System. Its institutional framing is one of solidarity: national resources remain the first line of defence, while shared European capacity provides reinforcement when a disaster overwhelms them. The Commission has also announced the acquisition of 12 additional firefighting aircraft and five helicopters for the permanent rescEU fleet.

That framing differs from the sharper debate inside Wallonia. In the Walloon Parliament, Socialist deputy Patrick Spies argued in October 2025 that the region lacked sufficient specialist vehicles, pilots, risk mapping and a mature inter-agency command structure. He called the response to a growing, foreseeable danger too slow. Walloon Agriculture and Rurality Minister Anne-Catherine Dalcq offered a different assessment: Wallonia was not starting from nothing, she said, pointing to an internal emergency plan, the regional crisis-management plan adopted in May 2025 and exercises involving the Nature and Forest Department, the regional CORTEX crisis centre, rescue zones, governors and municipalities.

Both perspectives are visible in the present operation. European aircraft can provide powerful short-term reinforcement, but they do not replace local prevention, trained crews, access routes or year-round command arrangements. Nor are shared aircraft automatically available: the Brussels-based coordination centre must weigh simultaneous requests across Europe, where prolonged heat and drought can create several major fires at once.

The High Fens are unusually difficult terrain. Their peatlands store carbon accumulated over centuries and can conceal heat after visible flames subside. Laurane Winandy, director of the University of Liège’s High Fens scientific station, told RTBF that rare active raised bogs and years of ecological restoration had been badly affected. The final ecological loss cannot be established until specialists can safely survey the burned ground.

The disaster also has a long memory. A major fire beginning in August 1911 burned for weeks and required more than 2,000 Belgian and Prussian soldiers, according to the University of Liège’s historical research. After large natural-area fires in 2011, Belgium developed procedures for airborne assistance and later tested French water bombers over the High Fens. A further fire burned roughly 155 hectares in 2023 and again prompted questions about aerial availability.

Attention will now turn to whether European aircraft can suppress the remaining hot spots, whether evacuations and access closures can be lifted, and how long peat combustion requires monitoring. Once the immediate danger passes, federal Interior authorities, Wallonia, the province of Liège and the rescue zones will face a harder question: whether European solidarity should remain Belgium’s principal answer to exceptional wildfires, or become the backstop to a stronger domestic capability.