EU sends aircraft as Belgium fights record wildfire

BRUSSELS, Aug 15 - The European Union deployed three helicopters and two water bomber aircraft to tackle a wildfire raging in eastern Belgium on Saturday, the bloc's crisis commissioner said, after Belgium requested emergency reinforcements to control its biggest blaze in decades.

The wildfire in the High Fens, Belgium's largest nature reserve, has been burning since Friday, with local firefighters, farmers and the army deployed to battle the blaze.

By early Saturday afternoon, it had burned 1,600 hectares, local media reported, citing statistics from the governor of Liege, the local province.

That would make the fire the biggest on record in Belgium, surpassing a blaze in 2011 which burned nearly 1,400 hectares, data from the European Forest Fire Information System showed.

European countries including Belgium suffered their fifth heatwave of the summer this week, fuelling the hot and dry conditions that support wildfires. Scientists have confirmed human-caused climate change is increasing the "fire-prone" weather conditions that allow wildfires to spread faster and burn longer.

The EU coordinates the deployment of extra resources pooled from European countries, when a country requests emergency help. The aircraft sent to Belgium on Saturday were from the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands, EU Crisis Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said in a post on X.

Firefighters and farmers were pumping water from local lakes to battle the blaze, a spokesperson for the infrastructure department for the region of Wallonia told Reuters on Saturday. REUTERS