BAELEN: Military helicopters backed by tractors on the ground hauled water on Sunday to help firefighters tame Belgium’s largest modern-day wildfire, which mushroomed in size since breaking out two days earlier in a hard-to-access nature reserve.

Local farmers have poured in to help battle the blaze in the High Fens park near the German border, an area of fragile peatlands and pine forests popular with hikers, joining several hundred firefighters and emergency workers.

From 80 hectares (200 acres) when it started on Friday, the fire has spread to 3,000 hectares of land and was heading towards the German border, local authorities said.

Near the blaze’s edge in Baelen, a ballet of tractors was pulling in tankers of water drawn from Robertville lake a few miles north — with water-bearing Chinook helicopters flown in from the Netherlands to spearhead the effort.

Firefighters from across Belgium and neighbouring Germany and Luxembourg have sought to contain the blaze, as have the army and farmers.

‘Still challenging’

Authorities described the conditions on Sunday as still “challenging”, but two of the fire fronts — heading towards the localities of Jalhay and Monschau — were now “under control”, according to Interior Minister Bernard Quintin.

The blaze broke out in an area that was ravaged by massive fires in 1911, during a similar period of heatwaves and drought — and is the country’s largest wildfire since then.

Fumes have travelled into the neighbouring Namur province, where authorities had to ask residents to stop saturating emergency phone lines with reports of the smell.

But authorities said operations were “particularly complex” because of the fens’ terrain — a patchwork of heath, peat bogs and raised wooden boardwalks where heavy vehicles risk sinking into the ground, and firefighters struggle to tackle the fire at close range.

European Commissioner Hadja Lahbib told AFP on Sunday that two water-bombing aircraft had arrived from Sweden, backing up four helicopters — two Belgian and two Dutch — already on site.

Responders were focused on the front line of the fire moving towards Germany and were hopeful that cooler, more humid weather would support efforts to contain it, Stephanie Ernoux, spokesperson for the administration of the Belgian region of Wallonia, told Reuters.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2026