Crews continued to battle a large wildfire raging in eastern Belgium on Sunday evening after the blaze destroyed around 3,000 hectares of land in a nature reserve.<\/p>\n
During the day, firefighters managed to bring parts of the blaze under control, including the front spreading towards the German border town of Monschau, Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin said.<\/p>\n
Local firefighters have received support from the Belgian military, which deployed six firefighting vehicles and a refuelling truck, Defence Minister Theo Francken said.<\/p>\n
Belgium has also receiving help from other European countries to battle the forest fire, which is the largest in Belgian history.<\/p>\n
In addition to two firefighting helicopters with large water tanks from the Netherlands, two water-scooping planes from Sweden were expected to be operational by Sunday afternoon, Quintin said.<\/p>\n
Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg are already deployed at the site, local authorities said.<\/p>\n
The rugged landscape of the High Fens nature reserve is complicating efforts to tackle the blaze, with few roads providing access and extensive peat bogs making firefighting difficult.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, around 600 people had to be evacuated from two Belgian municipalities close to the fire, which now covers an area the size of nearly 3,800 football pitches.<\/p>\n
The disaster has sparked an outpouring of solidarity, with several local farmers and businesses pitching in to support firefighters battling the blaze since it started on Friday.<\/p>\n
Authorities in the partly evacuated Belgian municipality of B\u00fctgenbach, however, urged members of the public and other farmers not to travel to the site of the fire on their own initiative, warning that uncoordinated assistance had disrupted traffic and hampered the work of emergency services.<\/p>\n
Situation eases near German border<\/p>\n
The situation also eased on Sunday in the German town of Monschau, around 20 kilometres from the fire.<\/p>\n
Authorities said there were no indications that the blaze would spread into Germany and that evacuations were not currently necessary.<\/p>\n
Residents of the Monschau districts of M\u00fctzenich and Kalterherberg, home to around 5,000 people, had been told overnight to prepare for a possible evacuation as a precaution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Crews continued to battle a large wildfire raging in eastern Belgium on Sunday evening after the blaze destroyed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[17759,7,3992,1564,17624,172,14576,430,17565],"class_list":["post-32897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-belgian-history","tag-belgium","tag-bernard-quintin","tag-eastern-belgium","tag-german-border","tag-germany","tag-monschau","tag-theo-francken","tag-wildfire"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/117106366822498834","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32897","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=32897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}