{"id":32629,"date":"2026-08-15T17:09:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T17:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/32629\/"},"modified":"2026-08-15T17:09:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T17:09:11","slug":"evacuations-ordered-as-wildfire-becomes-belgiums-biggest-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/32629\/","title":{"rendered":"Evacuations ordered as wildfire becomes Belgium&#8217;s &#8216;biggest fire&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Around 600 people in the Belgian towns of Waimes and B\u00fctgenbach were ordered to leave their homes on Saturday due to a rapidly spreading wildfire, shifting winds and heavy smoke, news agency Belga reports.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Around 1,600 hectares of land has burned since the fire started on Friday afternoon close to the German border.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">The raging blaze &#8220;is the biggest fire Belgium has ever seen,&#8221; public broadcaster RTBF and other Belgian outlets quote local politicians as saying.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Earlier on Saturday, Belgium requested assistance from other European Union countries to tackle the blaze.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">German firefighters have been at the site since Friday night, according to local authorities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Additional helicopters and aircraft from the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands have been mobilized, EU Crisis Commissioner Hadja Lahbib wrote on X on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p class=\"mb-4 text-lg md:leading-8 break-words\">Local authorities also requested help from the country&#8217;s army, which is sending firefighting vehicles from their air bases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Around 600 people in the Belgian towns of Waimes and B\u00fctgenbach were ordered to leave their homes on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,11271,10876,17568,17565],"class_list":["post-32629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-belgium","tag-evacuations","tag-local-authorities","tag-nature-reserve","tag-wildfire"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/117100633505814425","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32629","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=32629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}