Overview
- The Hohes Venn blaze has grown to about 3,000 hectares and on Monday prompted a targeted evacuation of 17 houses and roughly 30 residents in Monschau’s Ruitzhof and Geisberg neighborhoods.
- Germany committed two NH90 Bundeswehr helicopters equipped with Bambi buckets for an initial seven-day deployment to support Belgian and regional crews with aerial water drops.
- The Hürtgenwald fire in North Rhine-Westphalia is now largely under control and residents have been allowed to return, but crews remain on site to hunt and extinguish underground glows that can re-ignite.
- Separate wildfires in the Black Forest, Saarland, the Westerwald, Bavaria and Saxony are tying up hundreds of firefighters and aircraft and forcing cross-regional and international mutual aid.
- Peat and torf layers in the Hohes Venn make the fire hard to reach, so teams are using thermal imaging, hand tools and 20‑liter backpack pumps to root out smouldering peat while prosecutors in Liège investigate the blaze’s origin and communities supply volunteer water transports.