Croatian Wildfire Kills One, Injures 40 as European Blazes Spread to Belgium, Germany and the New Forest

One person is dead and 40 injured after a wildfire, whipped by strong winds, tore into the Croatian coastal town of Omis on Friday, according to Al Jazeera. Roughly 2,000 people were evacuated from villages near the coast. Croatia's fire chief, Slavko Tucakovic, called it "one of the worst in Croatia's history," telling national radio, "it was frightening even to watch." Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic visited the area and said the fire "spread at lightning speed."

A European wildfire season has already forced more than 300,000 people from their homes since mid-July, according to the BBC, which cites the European Forest Fire Information System's tally of roughly 606 square miles burned in the Madrid region alone since July 1.

Belgium's largest reserve now burning

In Belgium, residents of Liège province were told to evacuate Saturday afternoon as the country's biggest fire on record burned through the High Fens, the nation's largest nature reserve, according to The Guardian. That blaze compounds a summer already marked by Belgium's worst wildfire on record, a story already covered in this outlet's prior reporting.

In Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia state, all 1,800 residents of the village of Gey were evacuated after a fire in the Hürtgen forest threatened to reach their homes, CNN reported. Nearly 300 hectares were ablaze there as of Friday morning. Firefighting efforts have been complicated by unexploded World War II ordnance buried in the forest floor, with Germany's dpa news agency reporting explosions audible as old munitions detonated in the heat, forcing crews to pull back.

New Forest fire enters seventh day

In England, firefighters have been battling a blaze in the New Forest for seven straight days as of this weekend, according to The Independent. The fire covers about 1.6 square kilometers, and crews have logged nearly 10,000 combined labor-hours, with 169 fire appliances from at least 93 stations deployed. The A31 road remains closed and was expected to stay shut through Thursday.

The government issued an emergency phone alert to millions across England and Wales on Friday evening, warning people not to light barbecues, bonfires or garden incinerators. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a ban on disposable barbecues and said the alert was triggered at the request of firefighters. Fire services in Surrey asked the public to stop calling 999 to report neighbors' barbecues unless there was an actual emergency, saying the volume of non-emergency calls was overwhelming dispatchers.

That New Forest fire follows a separate blaze in Stourbridge, West Midlands, that destroyed 19 to 20 homes earlier in the week, according to local MP Cat Eccles, as reported by the BBC and ABC News. Simon Tuhill, chief fire officer of West Midlands Fire Service, said an investigation into that fire's cause is underway; it is believed to have started in grassland before spreading to homes.

Nearly 500 arrests in France

France's interior ministry says 474 people, including 183 minors, have been detained on suspicion of starting wildfires since July 1, according to The Guardian. About 70% of those arrests involve suspected deliberate arson; the remainder are accidental-cause cases. French media have reported a 15-year-old boy was detained over a fire near Bordeaux airport last month that killed two firefighters.

A new fire in the Landes region forced the evacuation of more than 525 people from the village of Luglon after burning nearly 1,100 hectares in under 24 hours, with regional official Gilles Clavreul telling reporters the fire "remains raging" as 500 firefighters and six water-dropping aircraft worked the site, per The Guardian and confirmed by the Associated Press.

France has also shut down six nuclear reactors in recent days because of extreme heat and drought conditions, and because a mass of jellyfish washed up outside one Channel-coast power plant, utility EDF said, according to the AP. EDF said the shutdowns had minimal impact on electricity supply and that the heat poses no safety risk to the reactors themselves.

The scale, and what's unproven

The EU's Copernicus climate service has flagged "very extreme" wildfire conditions stretching across central and eastern Europe, with additional risk pockets over southern Britain, Ireland, northern France and southern Sweden, The Guardian reported. Friday's average high across western Europe hit 31.2C, about 8C above the 1961-1990 norm, per Reuters Climate Monitor data cited by The Guardian.

Scientists broadly attribute the intensity and frequency of this pattern to human-caused climate change, a link cited by the AP, CNN and ABC News without dissent among the sources reviewed. What remains unresolved on the ground is narrower and more immediate: how much of the French arson total reflects genuine malicious intent versus reckless accidents like discarded cigarettes or unattended campfires, since French authorities themselves say most arrests are for accidental causes, not deliberate ones. The cause of the Stourbridge fire is still under formal investigation. In the New Forest, fire officials have been explicit that containment does not mean the danger has passed. Assistant chief fire officer Rob Cole told The Independent, "there are many days of work ahead of us to ensure that this fire doesn't spread when the wind blows or when other hotspots start to occur."