Can Belgium contain the historic High Fens fire before it burns underground for months?

Belgian, German and EU-backed crews halted Belgium’s largest recorded wildfire short of the German border on Monday, 17 August, but officials said the roughly 3,000-hectare blaze in the High Fens was still not contained. Rain and cooler weather helped hundreds of firefighters after four days of operations, while King Philippe interrupted his holiday to visit emergency workers, according to the Associated Press.

For residents of eastern Belgium, the immediate questions remain practical: when can evacuees return, which roads and trails will reopen, and could flames regain ground? About 600 people in Waimes and Bütgenbach were told to leave on Saturday as winds shifted, the AP reported. German authorities also advised people near Monschau, in North Rhine-Westphalia, to move away from the border area because of smoke. No deaths were reported in the Belgian fire in the sources reviewed.

The fire began on Friday, 14 August, and spread through heath, peatland and pine forest in Liège province. Provincial governor Hervé Jamar said on Sunday that more than 250 emergency personnel had been deployed, including Belgian and German firefighters, police, military personnel and Civil Protection staff. By Monday, reporting indicated that around 500 responders and farmers were involved. The precise final burn perimeter and the cause of the fire remain undetermined.

Belgium also activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, bringing helicopters from Czechia and the Netherlands and water-bombing aircraft from Sweden, according to Reuters. That turns an intensely local disaster into a test of a European system coordinated through the European Commission’s Emergency Response Coordination Centre. Belgian Commissioner Hadja Lahbib had described the EU’s record 2026 wildfire deployment in June as “European solidarity in action”; the High Fens operation now places that promise under scrutiny inside her own country.

There are two distinct ways to read the crisis. Jamar and the provincial crisis structure are necessarily focused on containment, evacuations and preventing the fire from reaching populated or cross-border areas. Their cautious message is that stopped expansion does not yet mean the fire is controlled. That operational framing is more precise than the dramatic international shorthand of Belgium being overwhelmed by a record blaze.

Ecologists see a much longer emergency. Laurane Winandy, director of the University of Liège’s High Fens scientific station, told Belgian media that more than half of the nature reserve may have been affected and that rare peat habitats and years of restoration work had been damaged. She described the landscape as Belgium’s “lung”. Because peat can smoulder below the surface and flare again, a ranger told the AP that suppression and monitoring could continue for months. The full ecological loss cannot responsibly be calculated while the ground remains dangerous.

The historical comparison is stark. Wallonia’s public administration identifies the April 2011 High Fens fire, which burned about 1,200 hectares, as the region’s previous largest recorded wildfire. The current estimated footprint is more than twice that figure. The plateau is not an ordinary forest: it contains waterlogged peat, heath and habitats developed over centuries, making recovery slower and more complex than replacing burned trees.

The broader European context matters without displacing the Belgian story. The European Commission says long dry spells, wind, vegetation and land management interact to increase wildfire danger. For 2026, it assembled 22 aircraft, five helicopters and 777 firefighters for shared deployment. The Council of the EU has meanwhile called for stronger prevention, preparedness and landscape management as destructive fires spread beyond Europe’s traditionally fire-prone south.

Crews must now extinguish hotspots, monitor the peat and reassess evacuation and access restrictions. Authorities will also need to establish the cause, map the ecological damage and explain whether Belgium’s prevention, warning and aerial-response capacity matched a risk that had been repeatedly identified before this summer. Until those assessments are complete, claims about the final area burned or the time needed for recovery should be treated as provisional.