Wildfires kill two on Greek island Salamis

An elderly couple died outside their home on the Greek island of Salamis as a fast-moving wildfire triggered evacuation orders for more than 500 people, according to the Guardian. At the same time, a separate blaze in Belgium’s High Fens nature reserve burned thousands of hectares and pushed toward the German border, sending hundreds of residents in nearby municipalities out of their homes.

The two fires show how Europe’s summer emergency response is increasingly built around moving scarce assets—aircraft, crews, and command capacity—across borders rather than assuming each country can handle its own worst day. In Belgium, officials relied on a patchwork of help: German firefighters joined the effort, farmers pulled water with tractors from a nearby lake, and air support included two water-bombing aircraft from Sweden alongside helicopters from Belgium and the Netherlands, the Guardian reports. The terrain in the High Fens made that airlift central to the plan. Dense forest and peat bogs, plus raised wooden boardwalks, meant heavy vehicles risked sinking, turning access roads and load limits into operational constraints as real as wind direction.

Evacuations in Belgium were not only for residents. Tourists were told to leave, and a sports hall became a temporary shelter for a small group overnight, while others stayed with family and friends. Authorities also prohibited access to lakes used for aircraft refilling, effectively converting leisure infrastructure into a logistics node. By Sunday afternoon, Belgium’s interior minister Bernard Quintin said two fire fronts were under control while resources remained mobilised on the third day of firefighting.

Greece’s Salamis fire, meanwhile, put a fatal number on a familiar pattern: wildfire deaths often occur not in dramatic rescues but at the edge of private property, when people attempt to hold ground or flee too late. The same weekend brought another death in Spain, where a soldier died while helping to extinguish a large fire in Aragon that had burned for a week and threatened a centuries-old monastery, according to the Guardian.

Europe’s civil protection systems are built for surges, but surges become a baseline when heat and dry fuel align across multiple countries at once. When aircraft are shared, the limiting factor is no longer whether a country owns planes; it is whether neighbouring countries can spare them on the same day.

On Sunday, as Swedish water bombers cycled over a Belgian nature reserve and Greek authorities ordered coastal evacuations on Salamis, the fires were still being measured in hectares and missing hours of sleep rather than in a final perimeter.