Wildfires expose — and detonate — buried bombs and mines from WWI and
WWII
[August 22, 2026]
By SAM McNEIL
ELSENBORN, Belgium (AP) — 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.
Fueled by climate change, the fires and explosions show that the
continent’s “climatic luck” is running out, said Sarah Njeri, a peace
and conflict scholar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most
buried weapons stayed dormant.
“Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what
was previously stable,” Njeri said. Fires can ignite old munitions but
can also burn away the scrub and brush that hides them.
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.
Flames chewed up old battlefields and set off buried explosives
As they advanced, the flames moved over territory that has long been
known to hold unexploded weapons, a lethal legacy that lingered long
after the guns fell silent.
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.
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 sprinkled
throughout the province's dense peat-bog forest known as the High Fens.
In the first four years after Germany’s surrender in 1945, the munitions
killed six civilians, said Bernard Collard, a local historian who runs
the Truschbaum Museum near Belgium's border with Germany that houses a
collection of found objects from the war.
“When you go into a forest like this, you are not sure where the
explosives are,” he said. He remembers his father detonating a found
bomb in a quarry.
The fire in the High Fens, which stretches across the border with
Germany, is smoldering atop a much-bloodied battlefield where Nazis
fought Allied troops. The Battle of the Bulge was fought in and around
the High Fens.
The fire is even closer to the sites of two lesser-known skirmishes
along Elsenborn Ridge and in the Hurtgen Forest, which lasted 88 days
and killed about 33,000 American and 28,000 German troops.
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Members of a bomb disposal unit, Dieter Schwaetzler, left, and Rene
Bennert sit next to 1.8 ton World War II bomb after defusing it in
Frankfurt, Germany, Sept. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)
Every year, Belgium responds to thousands of calls about
explosives
Collard is authorized to scan with a metal detector the former
battlefields, now forests, pastures and farmland. He has found
mortar shells, machine guns, helmets, cigarette cases, and once, a
human skeleton.
“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.
Unexploded ordnance is even more dangerous around wildfires because
heat can trigger the explosives, said Jonas Tepe, a spokesperson for
North Rhine-Westphalia, just across the border in Germany.
The Belgian Ministry of Defense said it receives requests from the
region about every week to assist in disarming explosives, yet it
does not consider the area a “hot spot” compared to elsewhere in
Belgium. Such requests are even more common in the west, where
farmers in towns such as Ypres — infamous for harrowing trench
warfare in World War I — call the annual tilling of the soil “ the
iron harvest ” because it turns up so many war remnants.
Every year across the nation, Belgium’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal
and Destruction Service responds to more than 3,000 calls and
disposes of 200 to 250 tons of munitions left over from both world
wars.
Flames are not the only threat
Drought has also helped to lay the past bare by shrinking rivers and
lakes to reveal old weapons.
In Slovakia, the Danube River fell and exposed two naval mines that
police pulled out of the water and buried in a trench for a
controlled demolition. Authorities in Hungary closed Budapest's
Margaret Bridge after a bomb dating from World War II emerged at its
base in receding water.
As the Rhine dried up, German authorities also found a WWII-era
bomb.
Christina Greene, a researcher at the University of Arizona who,
with Njeri, wrote an article on Europe’s wildfires and unexploded
ordnance risk, said “the legacy of war keeps creeping up” because of
climate change.
“It's reliving the legacies of war and conflict in a way that we
haven't had to deal with in a while in certain places."
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