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A wildfire described as the largest in Belgium’s recent history has more than doubled in size in 24 hours, tearing through the country’s biggest nature reserve and prompting the evacuation of two villages
Hautes Fagnes is Belgium’s largest nature reserve and is known as being one of the wettest, coldest, and muddiest places in the country.Belgium’s largest nature reserve, Hautes Fagnes, is a boggy moorland and forest near the country’s eastern border with Germany – known as one of the wettest, coldest, and muddiest places in the country.
That’s why it’s pretty peculiar that, since last week, a wildfire has been ripping through it at a pace that local officials say they’ve rarely had to deal with before.
According to AFP citing local officials, the fire went from 80 hectares on Friday 14 August to 850 hectares by the next morning. By early Sunday, it had consumed 3,000 hectares. Nicolas Yernaux, spokesman for the regional authorities in Wallonia, said on Saturday that it was the country’s “largest in recent history”.
Difficult ground, limited access
The issue with putting the fire out is that the terrain of the reserve has been extremely hard to get to, officials has said. The area where the fire started hasn’t been accessible to rescue teams at all, which means nobody knows yet what caused it. Firefighters have had to let parts of the heathland burn because they simply couldn’t reach them, Yernaux said.
Hundreds of firefighters have been working on it for three days, backed by local farmers who hauled water
Original Record.
This archived record authored by ‘Lee Bell’ at ‘METEORED (Your Weather)’ was recovered from data set:
English