Due to the massive forest fire in eastern Belgium, German authorities have ordered an evacuation in parts of the border town of Monschau in North Rhine-Westphalia state in western Germany.<\/p>\n
The current situation required the immediate evacuation of a number of streets, the town of Monschau announced on its website late Sunday.<\/p>\n
Residents were told to leave the affected homes immediately. Emergency accommodation was set up at a secondary school in the area. Seventeen homes and up to 30 people were affected.<\/p>\n
Earlier Sunday, authorities in Monschau said there were no indications that the blaze would spread into Germany and that evacuations were not currently necessary.<\/p>\n
On Sunday afternoon, Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin told broadcaster RTL that firefighters managed to bring parts of the blaze under control, including the front spreading towards Monschau.<\/p>\n
But he did say then that winds are “completely unpredictable, shifting through a full 360-degrees in the course of a single day,” adding that the direction in which the fire spreads remains uncertain.<\/p>\n
The wildfire has destroyed around 3,000 hectares in the High Fens nature reserve in eastern Belgium.<\/p>\n
Belgium has received support from several European countries, including two firefighting helicopters from the Netherlands and two water-bombing aircraft from Sweden. Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg were already at the scene, local authorities said.<\/p>\n
According to the province of Li\u00e8ge, the fire is not yet under control. Around 500 emergency personnel and 120 vehicles are involved in the firefighting effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Due to the massive forest fire in eastern Belgium, German authorities have ordered an evacuation in parts of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54494,937,54445,2634,5,49966,54446,54493],"class_list":["post-73477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-authorities","tag-belgium","tag-eastern-belgium","tag-german-authorities","tag-germany","tag-local-authorities","tag-monschau","tag-partial-evacuation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}