High Fens wildfire burns 3,000 hectares as European aircraft reinforce Belgian crews

Belgian and international crews continued fighting the country’s largest recorded wildfire in the High Fens on Monday, after Walloon authorities said the affected area had grown to about 3,000 hectares and the advancing fire had been stopped short of Germany. The blaze, which began on Friday in eastern Liège province, remained uncontrolled despite cooler conditions and some rain, according to the Associated Press. Its final burned area—and the damage below ground in the reserve’s peat—cannot yet be established.

The latest estimate supersedes an earlier figure of roughly 1,600 hectares carried in the first wave of reporting. For residents of Belgium, the immediate stakes are unusually direct: about 600 people in Waimes and Bütgenbach were told to evacuate on Saturday after changing winds pushed smoke towards inhabited areas, the Associated Press reported. Authorities also advised tourists to leave, restricted access around the reserve and opened a sports hall for evacuees.

Liège provincial governor Hervé Jamar said more than 250 emergency personnel had been deployed by Sunday. They included Belgian and German firefighters, police officers, military personnel and Civil Protection teams. Farmers also assisted on the ground. King Philippe interrupted his summer holiday to visit responders on Monday, according to the Associated Press, giving the emergency national visibility as crews concentrated on the eastern flank, around eight kilometres from the German border.

The response also became a test of European disaster cooperation. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism supplied two Swedish water-bombing aircraft, while helicopters from the Netherlands and the Czech Republic joined the operation. Germany and Luxembourg provided personnel, illustrating that the relevant European connection is operational rather than simply institutional: Brussels hosts the EU bodies coordinating assistance, but the emergency itself is being managed in Wallonia and across a real border with North Rhine-Westphalia.

The High Fens are not an ordinary commercial forest. The protected landscape contains heath, wetland, woodland and carbon-rich peat, and forms part of the EU’s Natura 2000 conservation network. Laurane Winandy, director of the University of Liège’s High Fens scientific station, told RTBF that more than half of the nature reserve had been destroyed and described it as Belgium’s ecological “lung.” She warned that active raised bogs can represent thousands of years of accumulated peat and that restoration cannot quickly replace their carbon-storage function.

That ecological framing differs from the wider international coverage, which has presented the Belgian fire as one front in a summer of European wildfires stretching from Greece and France to Britain and Germany. Both perspectives are valid, but they answer different questions. The European view shows how extreme fire conditions are moving into countries with limited experience of megafires; the Walloon scientific view stresses that a relatively small fire by Mediterranean standards can devastate a large share of a rare Belgian habitat.

Firefighters face a further problem beneath the visible flames. A forest ranger told the Associated Press that fire can persist underground in peat and flare again for months. That makes rain helpful without making the emergency over. The fire also moved into pine woodland on Sunday, increasing concern that it could spread faster and closer to Germany.

The precedent most often cited by Walloon authorities is the April 2011 High Fens fire. Belgium’s Interior Ministry recorded more than 1,300 hectares affected and nearly 300 firefighters deployed, including 25 from Germany. A later EU Joint Research Centre assessment mapped 1,358 hectares burned within the Plateau des Hautes-Fagnes Natura 2000 site. The present blaze has already exceeded those modern official estimates, although historical research records a much larger, roughly 4,000-hectare High Fens fire in 1911. Claims that the current event is the largest “ever” should therefore be understood as referring to modern records rather than the entire documented history of the landscape.

Authorities have not announced a confirmed cause. Weeks of hot, dry weather created highly combustible vegetation, but those conditions do not establish how the first ignition occurred. Investigators will examine that question after the site is secure. Until then, evacuated residents should follow municipal and provincial instructions rather than return independently, while walkers and sightseers should stay away from the closed reserve. The next tests are whether crews can fully contain the perimeter, whether underground peat continues burning and how much of the protected habitat can recover.