Crews battled a massive wildfire that scorched a nature reserve in eastern Belgium and another on a Greek island near Athens where two people were killed on Sunday as hot and dry conditions fueled fires in Europe. A blaze in eastern Belgium burned about 12 square miles in the High Fens, a large nature reserve, in one of the country’s worst wildfires in recent history. About 600 residents in the nearby municipalities of Waimes and Bütgenbach, near the German border, were told to evacuate on Saturday as winds shifted and smoke spread through the area. Authorities also advised tourists to leave, the AP reports, while a nearby gymnasium was opened to receive evacuees.
Farmers from both Belgium and Germany filled up tanker trucks, pumping water from a nearby lake before heading toward the fire area to help firefighters. Belgium activated the European Union’s civil protection mechanism to receive assistance from other countries, EU Commissioner Hadja Lahbib, who is in charge of crisis management, said on X. “The High Fens are burning. Belgium is not facing it alone,” Lahbib said. In Greece, two people were killed in a wildfire Sunday on the island of Salamina, west of Athens, firefighters said. The bodies were recovered in the village of Peristeria, where strong winds fueled the rapidly spreading blaze. A second blaze was reported in the Selini area. Firefighting and coast guard vessels were evacuating beachgoers. The island had been placed at high wildfire risk on Sunday, with near gale-force winds.
“These conditions enabled the fire to quickly reach dangerous proportions and spread rapidly within seven minutes toward nearby residential areas,” a fire official said. In the UK, emergency crews were fighting 14 wildfires in South Wales with the support of military personnel. Authorities warned that although the heat wave is easing, drought conditions mean the risk of wildfires remains high. Fires gutted more than a dozen homes in the West Midlands in central England last week as officials recorded the hottest day of the year on Thursday, when temperatures reached 100.6 degrees F. In Germany, firefighters made significant progress against a wildfire in the Hürtgen Forest, allowing about 2,000 evacuated residents of Gey to return home Saturday.