Is Belgium prepared for another disaster on the scale of the High Fens fire?

Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin

Place

High Fens

Protected eastern Belgian landscape where almost 3,000 hectares were affected.

Why it matters

Protected eastern Belgian landscape where almost 3,000 hectares were affected.

About

The High Fens, which were declared a nature reserve in 1957, are an upland area, a plateau region in Liège Province, in the east of Belgium and adjoining parts of northwestern Germany, between the Ardennes and the Eifel highlands. The High Fens are the largest nature reserve or park in Belgium, with an area of 4,501.2 ha ; it lies within the German-Belgian natural park Hohes Venn-Eifel, in the Ardennes.

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The latest assessment is cautiously reassuring rather than a declaration that the emergency is over. In an update issued early on 24 August, the Walloon government said several hotspots had reignited overnight and required intervention. Fires can continue to smoulder in the peat-rich ground of the High Fens and return when wind and weather conditions change. Forest and nature areas therefore remain closed or subject to strict restrictions, including parts of the territory of Spa, while the public information line 1771 remains available.

Air monitoring has also been reinforced. According to the Walloon Public Service, seven additional micro-sensors were installed around the affected area, supplementing existing monitoring stations. Earlier measurements found no worrying carbon-monoxide concentrations, while a temporary rise in fine particles during the night of 22 to 23 August subsided by the morning. Initial laboratory results from more detailed environmental sampling were expected from 24 August, meaning the longer-term effects on soil, water and habitats cannot yet be stated with confidence.

The political argument now concerns whether a response that ultimately contained the fire also exposed structural weaknesses. Speaking to the Chamber of Representatives' Interior Committee on 20 August, Quintin, a member of the French-speaking liberal MR, rejected the assertion that Belgium had started from nothing. He told MPs that the country's graduated emergency system had worked, pointing to the mobilisation of fire zones from across Belgium, Civil Protection

Organisation

Civil Protection

Federal emergency service involved in Belgium’s national disaster-response capacity.

Why it matters

Federal emergency service involved in Belgium’s national disaster-response capacity.

About

Civil defense or civil protection is an effort to protect the citizens of a state from human-made and natural disasters. It uses the principles of emergency management: prevention, mitigation, preparation, response, or emergency evacuation and recovery. Programs of this sort were initially discussed at least as early as the 1920s and were implemented in some countries during the 1930s as the threat of war and aerial bombardment grew.

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Quintin announced that he would present the federal government with a national action plan for fighting wildfires. His central argument is that preparedness should be judged not by whether Belgium owned every possible resource in advance, but by whether its system could assemble national and international capacity when required. The mobilisation did eventually include Belgian Defence's Panther vehicles, which can deliver large volumes of water from positions that conventional fire engines cannot reach, the Defence Ministry said.

Opposition parties have applied a stricter test. DéFI demanded urgent hearings in both the federal and Walloon parliaments and asked why Belgium lacks its own water-bombing aircraft and a shared, real-time inventory of emergency resources. In the Chamber, MPs from parties including the PVDA-PTB and Vlaams Belang questioned whether rescue services possessed adequate equipment. Vooruit MP Axel Weydts argued that the federal Interior Ministry should assume a clearer coordinating role during the next major disaster, while committee chair Ortwin Depoortere of Vlaams Belang challenged the minister's upbeat presentation.

That disagreement is not simply about whether firefighters performed well. There is broad political recognition of their work. It is about the standard against which the state should be assessed: successful improvisation and mutual assistance, or the ability to deploy specialised resources immediately without depending heavily on equipment from elsewhere. Quintin's promise of a new plan implicitly recognises that the existing arrangements need reinforcement, even as he defends their basic architecture.

Belgium's institutional structure makes that assessment unusually complex. Nature conservation, forests and much environmental monitoring in the High Fens are Walloon regional responsibilities. Municipal authorities, the Liège

Place

Liège

Province whose governor has important responsibilities in coordinating local emergency operations.

Why it matters

Province whose governor has important responsibilities in coordinating local emergency operations.

About

Liège is a city and municipality in the Belgian region of Wallonia, and the capital of the eponymous province. The city is situated in the valley of the Meuse, in the east of Belgium, not far from borders with the Netherlands and Germany. In Liège, the Meuse meets the river Ourthe. The city is part of the sillon industriel, the former industrial backbone of Wallonia. It is still the principal economic and cultural centre of the region.

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This division permits specialised local knowledge and assistance from across the country, but it also creates handover points where maps, equipment requests and command structures must align. The High Fens operation will therefore test more than the size of any single budget. Investigators and MPs will need to establish when reinforcements were requested, what was immediately available, which delays were avoidable and whether each authority understood its role.

The fire also arrives five years after the deadly July 2021 floods exposed weaknesses in Belgian risk assessment and crisis communication. Federal Climate, Mobility and Ecological Transition Minister Jean-Luc Crucke said the High Fens blaze showed that climate-related risk was no longer theoretical and called for science to play a stronger part in prevention. His department does not direct local firefighting, but it has a role in the broader federal approach to climate adaptation and resilience.

That argument adds a longer horizon to the immediate political scrutiny. Better firefighting equipment may limit damage once a blaze begins, but prevention also depends on land management, access routes, detection, trained personnel and planning for periods of heat and drought. Decisions in those areas cross regional and federal portfolios, making coordination a policy requirement rather than an administrative preference.

The debate is unfolding during the 2024-2029 federal legislature, with Bart De Wever's coalition under pressure to demonstrate that budget discipline is compatible with stronger civil resilience. The Walloon authorities must separately assess ecological losses, possible compensation, disaster recognition and any regulatory changes. The next meaningful test will be the promised national wildfire action plan and the formal after-action review. Until those are published, Quintin's assertion that the system worked and the opposition's claim that Belgium was insufficiently prepared remain competing interpretations of an operation whose full chronology, cost and environmental consequences are still being established.