This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Water-bombing aircraft and farmers' tractors joined forces Sunday to help firefighters tame Belgium's largest modern-day wildfire, which has scorched vast swaths of a hard-to-reach nature reserve near the German border. The blaze has mushroomed to 3,000 hectares (7,500 acres) two days after breaking out in the High Fens park, an area of boggy peatlands and pine forests popular with hikers.
Area firefighting chief Luc Burette said that "if we cannot contain the fire," there was a risk it could spill over the German border just a stone's throw to the east. "We're hanging in there, because everyone wants this fire put out," Gregory Melotte, one of several hundred firefighters and emergency workers deployed on-site, told AFP. He was working his third shift in as many days.
"We've really limited the damage to stop it from taking hold in the tall fir trees"—but the blaze was not yet "under control," he conceded. A huge area straddling the border has been blanketed by a thick plume of yellowish smoke, prompting the partial evacuation of two Belgian villages. Around 20 people spent the night in a local sports hall.
The German town of Monschau also advised residents living closest to the fire to evacuate, saying the front was just 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) from the first inhabited areas. Water-bearing Chinook helicopters flown in from the Netherlands were spearheading the effort. But local farmers have also poured in to help battle the blaze, with a ballet of tractors pulling tankers of water drawn from a nearby lake.
"Right now there are about 15 tractors queuing to fill up," Jean-Pierre Robert, who manages a lakeside hotel, told AFP. "We moved our cows and opened up all our fences to give them access." Authorities described conditions Sunday as still "challenging." But Interior Minister Bernard Quintin said two of the fire fronts—heading toward the localities of Jalhay and Monschau—were now "under control." The blaze broke out for reasons still unknown in an area that was ravaged by massive fires in 1911, during a similar period of heat waves and drought, and is the country's largest wildfire since then. Fumes have reached the neighboring Belgian province of Namur, and even as far as eastern France, where the Moselle department triggered an air pollution alert.
On-site, shifting winds have complicated firefighters' efforts, but the Liege governor's office said that "the defensive line protecting evacuated areas is holding." "No homes have been affected at this stage, although the fire remains close and smoke levels are significant," it added. Firefighters from across Belgium and Germany have deployed across the zone, supported by next-generation fire engines. But authorities said operations were "particularly complex" because of the fens' terrain—a patchwork of heath, peat bogs and raised wooden boardwalks where heavy vehicles risk sinking into the ground and firefighters struggle to tackle the fire at close range.
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