European wildfires expose, detonate buried explosives from past wars

The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II that threaten crews responding to the flames.

Some of the weapons have exploded in the intense heat. Blasts have been reported in France , Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, where a bomb-disposal team was dispatched to check a forest threatened by flames near a site of fierce fighting in the Limburg province in 1944.

Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant . But this wildfire season was supercharged by heavy rains in January that spurred vegetation growth, which became kindling when the summer heat arrived. Those temperatures, combined with drought conditions, low humidity and stiff winds, offered an ideal environment for fire, according to a study issued last month by the World Weather Attribution group. The blazes have led to mass evacuations.

The current situation shows that Europe's "climatic luck" is running out, said Sarah Njeri, a peace and conflict scholar at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

"Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable," Njeri said.

In the eastern Belgian province of Liege, Gov. Hervé Jamar said "a few sporadic detonations" were recently heard and that emergency services were adapting to account for munitions buried in a fire area. He said no fire crews were in danger, but local media published photos of a firefighter handling a rusted bomb.

During World War II, booby traps, bombs and mines were scattered throughout the province's dense peat-bog forest known as the High Fens, which stretches across Belgium's border with Germany and was the site of key conflicts, including the bloody Battle of the Bulge. Now, a huge blaze is smoldering in the area.

Bernard Collard, a local historian who is authorized to scan the former battlefields with a metal detector, said that in an environment like this, "you are not sure where the explosives are." He said he has found mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases, and once, a human skeleton. His father once detonated a found bomb in a quarry.

"You never know what you might come across, and you shouldn't take it lightly," Collard said while standing in a field that was once a blood-soaked site. Nearby, blueberry bushes cover old foxholes, trenches and deep craters from artillery fire.

He frequently works with the Belgian demining squad. "It's part of our history. We live with it," Collard said.

In a forest in tinder-dry France, a massive wildfire outside the southwestern city of Bordeaux uncovered a cache of what is believed to be World War II-era ammunition. Around 400 shells and pieces of ammunition were recovered in the village of Le Porge earlier in August. The munitions, both German and French, consist mainly of mortar shells, along with some high-explosive anti-tank shells.

Fire commander Thomas Mimiague said blasts heard during the blaze may have been shells exploding.