Belgium wildfire rages on as shifting winds hamper containment efforts

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.

Emergency crews face particularly difficult conditions due to relatively strong and shifting winds, Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin told broadcaster RTL on Sunday evening.

The winds are "completely unpredictable, shifting through a full 360-degrees in the course of a single day," he said, adding that the direction in which the fire spreads remains unpredictable.

On Sunday evening, the blaze in the High Fens nature reserve continued to spread towards the south-south-east, Quintin told RTL.

On Sunday afternoon, Quintin had said that firefighters managed to bring parts of the blaze under control, including the front spreading towards the German border town of Monschau.

In Monschau, authorities said there were no indications that the blaze would spread into Germany and that evacuations were not currently necessary.

The public prosecutor's office of the Liège region has launched an investigation to determine the cause of the fire, news agency Belga wrote.

Local firefighters have received support from the Belgian military, which deployed six firefighting vehicles and a refuelling truck, Defence Minister Theo Francken said.

Belgium has also received help from other European countries to battle the forest fire, which has "a completely unprecedented scale," according to Quintin.

In addition to two firefighting helicopters with large water tanks from the Netherlands, two water-scooping planes from Sweden were deployed on Sunday afternoon, Quintin wrote on X.

Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg are already deployed at the site, local authorities said.

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.

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.

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.

Authorities in the partly evacuated Belgian municipality of Bütgenbach, 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.