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.