Emergency services battled a raging wildfire in a nature reserve in eastern Belgium overnight, hoping that reinforcements from abroad and cooler temperatures would help bring the blaze under control.
The fire front stretched for one kilometre on Sunday morning, public broadcaster RTBF reported.
The fire in the High Fens nature reserve changed direction several times during the night due to shifting winds, RTBF wrote.
The blaze, considered the country’s biggest wildfire on record, had destroyed around 2,700 hectares of land by Saturday evening, according to local authorities.
Besides shifting winds, the rugged landscape of the High Fens is complicating efforts to tackle the blaze, with few roads providing access and extensive peat bogs making firefighting difficult.
Additional help is expected to arrive on Sunday, after Belgium asked other European Union countries for assistance, RTBF said. Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg are already deployed at the site as well as two helicopters from the Netherlands, local authorities said.
Temperatures dropped overnight in Belgium after a heatwave earlier this week.
On Saturday, around 600 people had to be evacuated from two municipalities close to the fire.