The European Union deployed three helicopters and two water bomber aircraft to tackle a record wildfire in eastern Belgium, the bloc\u2019s crisis commissioner said on Saturday, after Belgium requested emergency reinforcements.<\/p>\n
The blaze in the High Fens, Belgium\u2019s largest nature reserve, has been burning since Friday and local firefighters, farmers and the army have sought to contain it.<\/p>\n
By early Saturday afternoon, it had burned 1,600 hectares, a spokesperson for the administration of the Wallonia region in Belgium told Reuters.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Local authorities on Saturday told residents in the village of Sourbrodt to prepare for a possible evacuation. A children\u2019s summer camp in the region was already being evacuated, Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken said in a post on X.<\/p>\n
European countries including Belgium suffered their fifth heatwave of the summer this week. Scientists say human-caused climate change has increased the likelihood of the hot and dry conditions that allow wildfires to \u200bspread faster and burn longer.<\/p>\n
The EU coordinates the deployment of extra resources pooled from European countries, when a country requests \u200cemergency \u2060help. The aircraft sent to Belgium on Saturday were from the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands, EU Crisis Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said in a post on X.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The European Union deployed three helicopters and two water bomber aircraft to tackle a record wildfire in eastern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,69,17565,1165],"class_list":["post-32603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-belgium","tag-europe","tag-wildfire","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/117099972730138355","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}