Belgium’s largest wildfire on record spreads towards German border

BREAKING: Belgium's largest wildfire on record is spreading toward the German border, having burned over 27 sq km, with 600 residents evacuated and firefighters from four nations battling the blaze.

Belgium's largest wildfire on record is burning towards the German border.

It started Friday in Liege province, in the High Fens nature reserve, and it's already torn through more than twenty-seven square kilometres. You can see the scale from the air here, white smoke rolling across the whole forest. Belgium's previous record fire, back in 2011, burned fourteen square kilometres in this same reserve. This one has nearly doubled it in two days.

About six hundred people in Waimes and Butgenbach were told to leave as the winds shifted. On the ground it looks like this, scorched terrain, water trucks working the dirt roads. More than two hundred and fifty personnel from Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are trying to hold the front line.

Across the border, the German town of Monschau says the flames are within three kilometres. This follows thirty-seven degree heat on Friday and weeks with almost no rain. Half a million hectares have burned across the EU this year, and summer isn't done.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.

Source Read the original reporting at aljazeera.com