Belgium’s biggest modern-day wildfire has devastated some 3,000 hectares, or 30 square kilometres, of the High Fens park on the border with Germany, while nearly 30 people in the German town of Monschau were ordered to evacuate from two streets near the frontier. The fire doesn’t care about the line on the map. The state does.
Borders Don’t Stop Fire
Rain started falling in Belgium on Monday to help fight the blaze, but not before the fire had sent a huge cloud of black smoke across the region into neighbouring Germany and France. Some 500 firefighters and troops are battling the fire, a reminder that when the land dries out and burns, the response still runs through the same old hierarchy: ministries, uniforms, and emergency orders delivered from above.
Germany’s defence ministry said on Monday that two military water-bombing helicopters would be sent to Belgium. The language is neat, the machinery is expensive, and the logic is familiar. Climate disaster arrives, and the answer is more military hardware. Not prevention. Not a serious break with the system that keeps heating the planet. Just another deployment.
Belgium has experienced a new spell of intense heat and drought in recent days, with temperatures reaching as high as 37C in some parts of the country on Friday. Scientists blame ever hotter and more frequent heatwaves on human-caused climate change, and Europe is tackling a spate of wildfires spurred by high temperatures and tinder-dry conditions during a historically hot summer on the planet’s fastest-warming continent. The continent warms, the institutions scramble, and ordinary people are left to breathe smoke and wait for orders.
The State’s Emergency Machine
In Greece, two people died and hundreds were evacuated from popular beaches when two fires broke out on the Greek island of Salamis near Athens, the fire department said. A coastguard spokesperson told the AFP news agency: “Over 570 people were evacuated on coast guard patrol boats and other vessels.” That’s the choreography of crisis management: evacuation by state vessel, rescue by state agency, and death still present in the background.
Greece has been hit with several major wildfires since late July after largely escaping the heatwave temperatures that blanketed much of Europe, and 36 blazes broke out over the past 24 hours around the country, according to the fire department. The numbers keep climbing. So do the temperatures. The institutions keep counting.
In Portugal, hundreds of firefighters were battling a series of blazes. At one fire near the border with Spain, near the village of Dine, five firefighters sustained minor injuries when their vehicle caught fire, local media reported. Firefighters were also battling several other fires near the Spanish border, including at Boticas and Chavez, said the civil protection agency ANEPC. The border keeps showing up, not as protection, but as another administrative line crossed by smoke, flame, and exhausted crews.
Militarisation in the Ashes
In Spain, a Spanish soldier died on Sunday while helping efforts to extinguish a major wildfire in Aragon, the northeastern region’s leader said, as the authorities deployed the largest firefighting arsenal in the region’s history. French reinforcements were due to help contain the wildfire, which broke out on Monday and has threatened a 1,000-year-old monastery. When the fire spreads, the state reaches for soldiers, helicopters, and reinforcements. The monastery gets a headline. The dead soldier gets a sentence. The system gets to call it response.
Croatian police said they had arrested four people suspected of starting some of the wildfires that have swept parts of the Adriatic coast in recent days. The four are suspected of setting fires that scorched pine forests and olive groves as Croatia battles a wave of blazes fuelled by drought and heat. The police move in, the suspects are named, and the wider conditions that make these summers so combustible stay exactly where they are.
A fire that burnt 1,700 hectares in the Landes department of southwestern France has been stabilised after three days of ground and air operations. Local official Gilles Clavreul said the situation was evolving “favourably” as temperatures had dropped, with 28C expected in the afternoon compared with 40C when the fire broke out on Thursday, and humidity had risen. The local prefect said a first group of the 650 people who had evacuated because of the fire would be allowed to return to their homes Sunday evening. Relief arrives, temporarily and unevenly, through the same prefectural machinery that orders people out when the flames come close.
The pattern is plain. Heat, drought, smoke, evacuation, military helicopters, coast guard boats, police arrests, prefects, defence ministries. Europe’s border states can mobilise fast when property, infrastructure, and heritage are threatened. What they still can’t do is stop the conditions that keep turning summer into a managed disaster.