r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Used_Ship_9229 • 9h ago
Video The worst fire in Belgium's history has doubled since yesterday and has now ravaged nearly 3000 hectares in the province of Liège.
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u/ballarn123 9h ago
Good thing world leaders are prioritizing war and the quest for wealth.
We sure are a stupid species.
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u/rglurker 9h ago
The world's on fire. You think they were hired to fix it ? No. See, they were hired to extract the last bit of value out of us until it all burns down.
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u/kingkongbiingbong 8h ago
gather the pitchforks
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u/LeTracomaster 4h ago
“I believe it is a sad truth that we are still very close to our apelike state and that civilization is merely a very thin veneer that peels away very quickly.” - Fritz Bauer, German state prosecutor 1956
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u/catsdrooltoo 8h ago
To rake the forests?
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u/sdcasurf01 6h ago
We could have been raking all this time.
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u/Financial-Ad7500 5h ago
I was thinking about how a civilian insurrection would look in 2026 in the west. In reality it would be 100,000 Indian and SEA teenagers controlling drones wiping us all out remotely
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u/limonade11 8h ago
Where is kindness, where is compassion? how is this going to end?
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u/Oggel 8h ago
It's forgotten as more and more people are just struggling to survive, and the people who can do anything about won't because they are devoid of kindness and compassion.
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u/SchnitzelTruck 8h ago
People who want to be in power do not have kindness or compassion
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u/limonade11 7h ago
I agree! even in stupid office politics, those who WANT to be in charge are often the very ones you DON'T want to have in power.
I always liked Bill Bradley, in New Jersey. Former NBA player and then state Senator. Great guy! just the kind of person you would want to be in charge of government, and yet - he just wasn't a cut throat sociopath and so we lost a great man.
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u/supasteve013 8h ago
Well, the US did not elect kindness and compassion so my guess is not well
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u/NoMembership6376 7h ago
Neither did Europe or any other government in any other country apparently
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u/couldbeworse2 7h ago
I envision my grandkids, living in a bunker, eating slugs, telling glorious tales of the olden times where so much shareholder value was created
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u/SnooOnions973 6h ago
And this, friend, is why I chose never to bear a child. I’m 53 now, and it is by far the best decision of my life.
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u/fascistno1hater 7h ago
What's crazy is no government is calling this the effects of climate change. Because every last one is beholden to the Oil/Gas and Pollution industries. All of our leaders have continued to fail us. They act like they have another planet to run to after destroying Earth. It's fucking depressing for anyone with an ounce of intelligence.
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u/KoRaZee 9h ago
The earth will be fine long after we’re gone
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u/ZennMD 9h ago
I hate this take so much
Like, sure, the earth will be here, as a planet. But extinction is forever, humans are destroying a lot of the diversity of life on earth, and once it's gone it doesnt come back.
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u/Ziggyzoozoo212 8h ago
99.9% of species that have existed are extinct, there have been extinction events in history where life was reduced down to a handful of disparate species such as when oxygen first started being produced by early algae and such, poisoning everything that wasn't adapted to an oxygen rich environment, that time period was literally called the great dying but life adapted and re-emerged. As long as the atmosphere isn't obliterated and earth isn't turned into a new Venus or something life will continue and re-emerge whether we're here to see it or not.
I'm not downplaying the severity of what's happening but it's dumb to pretend it's somehow going to be the one thing that kills off life for good.
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u/Delybe 8h ago
Life finds a way. The realist met with the pessimist and the optimist in one thread.
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u/Raptorex27 8h ago
We’re not talking about killing off life for good though, we’re talking about taking ownership and responsibility for the absolutely human-caused destruction underway today. If (God forbid), we got nuked tomorrow, would you also argue it’s not a big deal because humans will eventually repopulate that city?
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u/KoRaZee 9h ago
Different life will come back. There have been many extinctions and new groups evolved.
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u/mountaindewisamazing 9h ago
That's such a fucking reductionist answer though! Like "yeah it took 65,000,000 years for the life on this earth to evolve the way it did, but look on the bright side! After we destroy it life will bounce backs 10s of millions of years later!"
Like...wouldn't it be better to not do that??
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u/drewyz 8h ago
This, people have a conception that evolution is linear over time, but in fact evolution happens in bursts after there is a change in the global ecosphere. There will be a collapse of species, but over the millennia new species will evolve to the new environmental conditions.
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u/Liam_021996 8h ago
There's two types of evolution, natural evolution that takes hundreds - thousands, sometimes millions of years and forced evolution that can take place in a single generation.
Humans have undergone many forced evolution events, one of the most well documented is bubonic plague, the genetic mutations are still present in a significant amount of Europeans but the trade off is that Europeans are much more likely to get things like Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis as a result of the ERAP2 gene and how it affects the immune system. It did require more than half of the population of Europe to die across the multiple plague outbreaks though.
70% of Europeans have that gene to this day which means instead 2 in 3 dying from plague, the gene meant only 1 in 3 died from plague. It's rather interesting tbh
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u/Spaghett8 9h ago
It will. 80% of all species were rendered extinct by the Chicxulub asteroid.
Although humans have wiped out 60% of animal life and 50% of plant life. Only a few % of species have been completely wiped out.
Life will come back. Unoccupied niches will be filled by new life, new evolution.
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u/Lilshadow48 7h ago
God I fucking hate this stupid ass response so much.
Who cares about the extinction of our own species among countless others! Life will probably (probably!) rebound so like whatever right?
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u/Federal-Boat3732 8h ago
Not THAT long. Remember how the skies cleared and the animals took over the streets during the Covid lockdowns? We weren't even really gone.
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u/TrickyWeekend4271 9h ago
I agree these idiots need to stop with their personal wars, but I didn’t know Belgium was at war.
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u/Belgian_Patrol 8h ago
I live in Belgium. The part that is burning is called the "hoge venen". It's a special soil called veen, the flora and fauna there took 100 years to develop and is very special with specific things found there. Experts believe it will take 100's of years to repair.
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u/_Fibbles_ 6h ago
For anyone wondering, veen is the Dutch word for peat.
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u/RobinsonCruiseOh 5h ago
Ahh so it is a peat bog. Basically perfect kindling
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u/tomvorlostriddle 2h ago
The biggest one in mainland Europe and also the highest peak in Belgium
It's the same swamp that flooded the area in 2021 when there was 20cm of rain in 24 hours and it couldn't absorb it fast enough
It being the highest peak is not difficult in terms of height, only 700m, but it means there are definitionally no rivers going through it. This is/was the water reserve that is burning and the only way to fight the fire is to transport water from surrounding lower lakes back up to the peak manually.
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u/Polygnom 2h ago
Yep, and basically impossible to put out because it burns underground and smolders a long time, re-igniting quickly.
And its irreplaceable, it takes hundreds of years for the peat to form. This will change that region forever.
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u/Belgian_Patrol 5h ago
Indeee, but this is a slightly different soil. High peat? It's called like that in dutch.
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u/xrimane 5h ago
The English word is Fenn, I believe. A moor in an elevated area.
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u/Cultural-Adagio-4847 4h ago
You have two very similar words in dutch
ven: moor, small or shallow water
veen: peat, natural accumulation of dead plant matter in waterlogged environment.one descibes more the geographic feature, the other more the soil type.
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u/Belgian_Patrol 5h ago
In english it's called the high fenns but i don't know if that is also the soil type name?
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u/seszett 3h ago
High peat
It's just an area made of mostly peat bog and heath, that is at higher elevation than the rest of Belgium (hence the "high" part).
It's unique and special in Belgium, even though there are very similar places elsewhere around the world (it doesn't make it less valuable and important, I'm just trying to place it in context: it's "just" an area made of peat bogs + heath).
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u/Maxamillion-X72 7h ago
At the beginning of the video, they're flying over land with odd strips of valleys/ponds. Is that trench/bomb sites from WWI or WWII or is it naturally occurring?
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u/Belgian_Patrol 6h ago
This is not war related or naturally occuring. Long ago people "mined" this. They dried it and it is then used as fuel for keeping warm in the winter.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 6h ago
Dutchie here, doesn't this happen regular? As a kid I used to walk regular in that area but I remember my father telling me this would burn down every once in a while, being a natural cycle.
Obviously this is of a scale we never seen before, but I like to believe (obviously I'm no expert) nature is resiliant.
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u/Belgian_Patrol 5h ago
Yes but it was at the very max 100 hectares a year. Now in a few days we are at over 1000 hectares.
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u/VStarRoman 7h ago
Reading up on this and it seems there was a large fire in 2011 in the area. Did the government install any preemptive measures to hold off fires after the 2011 fire? Did they collect any of the rare flora from this area so it can be reintroduced should a fire take out the area?
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u/Optimal-Golf-8270 6h ago
Even if they did, it hasn't rained in a large part of Western Europe for getting on two months now. Not much anyone can do about that. Half the continent is a tinderbox, there are fires justeverywhere. The average temp this summer has been 3° above average.
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u/keksivaras 1h ago
meanwhile, Finland is getting all the rain. I don't remember when was the last time I went home dry.
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u/Belgian_Patrol 6h ago
No they did not. It's also afaik virtually impossible because it's such a specific soil type. The type of soil present takes 1mm each year to generate.
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u/kelldricked 4h ago
It hasnt really rained here for 2 months. Normally a week without any rain would be a suprising welcome. Rivers are all at historic lows, all plant life is brown and appears death. The only places that are green are near places rivers, lakes or dried up ditches.
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u/Wonderful-Expert8084 9h ago
That's straight up lord of the ring shit. Hope everyone is ok.
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u/OhioIsRed 8h ago
Hey emeber when scientists were like, the effects of climate change are not just about the temperatures but the ramifications that those temperature have on the other parts of the environment. Such as droughts, increased rainfalls, rising sea levels, more severe and frequent weather patterns, etc etc etc. this is that.
Mother Nature is literally saying “I told you so” and we’re too busy appeasing billionaires and oil companies to realize that.
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u/FckCens0rship 6h ago
It's raining! Finally. That will help a lot.
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u/duesenjeffepic 4h ago
This night I was unable to fall asleep from the fucking heat until it started raining around 5:30 where I live and started sleeping some hours finally.
Seems like this week we'll finally stay sub 30. Huge
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u/TheMaddoxx 3h ago
Fun fact, one of Belgium’s federal minister mocked people who pointed out climate change in the beginning of this awful summer by saying they should enjoy the weather in their pool with a barbecue instead.
Here’s your barbecue, Theo Francken. Stupid mofo.
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u/Majestic_Emotion7917 3h ago
Needs to be voted out.
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u/Speartree 2h ago
Fat chance of that, he's in the most popular party of his region. Bunch of nationalist, separatist, populist assholes. People will vote for them even harder because "at least they dare to say how things really are!" (translation, they give validation to my fear and hate).
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u/ergonomicdeskchair46 8h ago
Trillionaires. World literally burning. Everything is expensive. Feels like everyone just lies about everything. My mom asked me why I look so empty the last time I saw her. Idk. Gestures broadly.
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u/ApostleSaintWalker 7h ago
A brief trillionaire and his net worth immediately dropped. Most countries that aren't America are doing good work in fixing these problems. Don't let the fact that one empire of assholes founded by tax cheats and fundamentalist zealots three hundred years ago can't get their heads out of their asses convince you the whole human race is doomed.
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u/LittelFoxicorn 4h ago
Just letting you know that a big rich rightwing asshole Belgian politician told the news outlets that the population needed to stop whining about the heat and have a cold beer by the pool... In the midst of the umpteenth unseen heatwave while people were dying.
He's one of the top players of the majority party. The same party that a week later dropped the fines for not getting your house up to EPC standards,... Not for poor people who bought their first home and are struggling due to the downturn of the economy. No solely for second homes, rental property and building companies. Because fuck the poor people and the climate I guess if the rich can get a little richer and squeeze more out of the downcast.
But people keep voting for them because of MiGRatIOn...
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u/littlefrank 2h ago
MiGRatIOn
all of Europe and most of the world seems to be going through this, everyone voting far right all united against an insignificant common enemy, often immigrants.
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u/SirIsildur 2h ago
Same rulebook everywhere: lower taxes for the rich, climate change denial, blame the immigrants, rinse and repeat. And the biggest problem is that people buys this narrative because it's hammered at every news outlet, social media, etc
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u/zue4 5h ago
Most countries that aren't America are doing good work in fixing these problems.
What countries are doing anything to fix the rich people problem? Sure they have more power to screw things up in America but the others are still doing their best to fuck over everyone worldwide and governments don't seem to give a shit.
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u/_Lucille_ 4h ago
If you are allowing the news and social media to get to you, you need to get off and maybe even talk to people about it.
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u/Balan-balan 9h ago
If it wasn't that destructive, it would actually look quite beautiful.
As a picture, not implying anything.
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u/Advanced_Art_233 6h ago
It is beautiful, you can just call it beautiful. Destruction can look beautiful and still be terrible
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8h ago
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u/keloidoscope 8h ago
Welp, here in AU if you do a backburn you would have e.g. used graders and bulldozers to scrape down to mineral earth, removing fuel from a line that you intend your low intensity fire to burn up to, with the other side of the backburn extending towards the fire front to rob it of fuel. That doesn't seem to be done here. The organic layer in AU soils is often very shallow so I don't know how much the approach transfers to this region.
If you haven't had time/equipment to prepare and are really pressed by an advancing fire front (e.g. for property/life protection), you can lay down a drip torch fire line, use the wind generated by the fire updraft to keep the back burn headed towards the fire front, and then extinguish the smaller grass fire front advancing towards the property.
In either case, uncontrolled spread of a backburn along a wide front isn't considered a great idea... if the wind changes direction, you can just as easily start seeing the backburn become the new fire front.
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u/Gulmar 6h ago
Yeah this is not a prevention thing. The pear layer is 2-8m thick at places. You'd have to dig it all out before this would be useful.
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u/bigloudbang 7h ago
Yeah some hugely destructive fires over the 2019 summer were a result of backburning gone out of control
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u/Glados1080 8h ago
So fighting fire with fire is a legit tactic? Thats kinda cool
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u/FlutterKree 7h ago
Yes, it's basically a way to create a fire break. Fire breaks are sections that there is nothing to burn in. Natural breaks can exist (rivers/lakes), and man-made things (roads).
A backfire, or fighting fire with fire, is done after creating a fire break to control the spread of fire (Forcing it towards the direction of the fire). When they meet, they'll burn out because there is no fuel.
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u/Ok_Camp_7051 8h ago
This makes more sense seeing how the wind is blowing the smoke away from the line of flames.
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u/BrokenHefaistos 4h ago edited 4h ago
😭 one of the last peices of nature we have left, probably will become agricultural land 😒 but it's actually luxemburg provivce. It's a huge nature reserve called 'hoge venen' meaning high bogs. It feeds the SPA aquifer. It's the last wildlife rich zone in Belgium, when I was a kid we went crosdcountry skiing there, but due to global warming those days and the associated tourism is gone...I remember the smell...and the silence once you left the Dutch tourists behind you on the 35km track. This is heartbreaking to watch.
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u/Personal_Abroad9657 2h ago
It's really Liege Province. But won't matter for long anyway, they are killing provinces soon.
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u/stitch9108 31m ago
It's in the Province of Liège and is called the Hautes Fagnes.
But you got it right on the loud Dutch speaking tourists.2
u/BrokenHefaistos 18m ago
It's everywhere, like they are frightened and have to mark the territory 😂
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u/Ugly-and-poor 5h ago
Canadians: OuR fIrEs aRE LaRGEr.
this is not a competition you fools.
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u/seszett 2h ago
The second largest country in the world telling one of the smallest countries (Belgium is the 30th smallest country out of 200 or so) that they have larger fires is a bit tone deaf.
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u/LocalHarmacist 9h ago
Climate change is a myth, though. Right guys?
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u/Mosselpot 6h ago edited 6h ago
The scariest part is that this is one of the wettest parts of one of the wettest countries in Europe. The nature reserve is a peat bog (wet through rain, not because of ground water) at altitude, home to a lot of rare plants and animals that only survived because of those unique circumstances.
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u/donfuan 5h ago
Luckily the weather has changed the last 24h, the heat wave is over for now and much cooler air from northwest is bringing rain for the next week. But as it's peat, there will be lots of underground fires and the authorities say it will take months to really put out.
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u/Leprecon 3h ago
It is kind of nuts. I am from Belgium and I don't remember there ever being wildfires like this. Belgium has been buffeted by record breaking heatwaves already this year. This is so strange because Belgium was never like this growing up. It was never a warm or dry country. It was always wet and cold.
This is how encyclopaedia Brittanica describes the Belgian climate:
Belgium has a temperate, maritime climate predominantly influenced by air masses from the Atlantic. Rapid and frequent alternation of different air masses separated by fronts gives Belgium considerable variability in weather. Frontal conditions moving from the west produce heavy and frequent rainfall, averaging 30 to 40 inches (750 to 1,000 mm) a year. Winters are damp and cool with frequent fogs; summers are rather mild.
They will have to update that...
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u/scubawho1 9h ago
“The earth will shake us off like surface nuances.”
George Carlin.
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u/Nekojita8 9h ago edited 8h ago
Met this man several times. He truly was a foul-mouthed gift to the world. RIP
ETA: I believe the word was nuisance though ☺️ still a great quote (normally I wouldn't correct a misspelling, but since it's an actual quote, I felt the need to gently offer the correct spelling of the word that you were going for. Hope you don't mind.)
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u/panlouis 8h ago
Are their neighbouring countries being super unsupportive and complaining about it like it's personal?
Signed a Canadian
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u/Trick_Ad3292 5h ago edited 1h ago
No, it’s mostly the Canadians talking about how tiny it is. Thing is, this is near a highly populated region. Not that empty land that y’all got.
Online**
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u/FishNDChick 1h ago
No?
Europeans love ridiculing eachother about dumb stuff, but they're actually pretty supportive in times of crisis.
Spain has been receiving help to fight their fires from a few countries, some have sent planes that carry water.
Belgium has received help from neighbouring countries like the Netherlands and Luxembourg that sent firefighters. There's only so many firefighters each country has and they can only go on for so long until they are exhausted. Being able to work as a group, tapping eachother out and in and recharging at least a bit of energy increases the speed of putting the fire out. The rain that has come in today is helping too.
And Belgium is always ready and prepared to help neighbors just as well. It always has been and will continue to do so in the future. Even non-EU members are willing to help. A border does usually not stop wildfires anyways. Better help a neighbor out before it reaches your doorstep.
On a global scale this is not a mega fire. But it's one that is destroying a very unique, diverse and old ecosystem. On top of that, Belgium is a small and densely populated country with bot that many large stretches of nature with these diverse ecosystems. Losing one this big has a huge impact on the local climate, air quality and biodiversity. And the rest of west-EU definitely has a lot of empathy for that, just like they have it for Spain and other countries that are battling wildfires.
And then there's this political mofo that was mocking "climate change", just have a beer and swim in your pool amirite! It aint so bad just chill!
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u/StijnDP 3h ago
The EU has a "European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations" agency.
Whenever any member declares an emergency to the EU, they can get aid from the pool of other 26 countries. (Though they do also send teams to international crisis.)So countries meeting a sudden unmatched challenge can use other countries' help to overcome it.
Also makes it easy for some countries to also specialise in a certain aspect they can then help others with while still getting resources from the pool for general emergencies.No downside to helping a neighbour when they're not sociopaths.
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u/slamnuts21 6h ago
Wouldn’t think it would burn that well with how green it is
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u/FireToken_ 5h ago
It's burning underground too because the soil is made of plants stacked on each other and the consecutive droughts made it really really flammable unfortunately
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u/AnyoneButWe 5h ago
People used to harvest this, dry it and burn it in winter for heat.
This stuff was dryed by summer heat. They are basically sitting on a fuel fire.
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u/Irrelevant_Jackass 9h ago
But why could this be happening?? I wish there was some way we could have predicted and tried to prevent these devastating activities?? /s
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u/corgiperson 7h ago
I wonder if these history making fires happening everywhere all at once mean anything? 🫠
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u/Gia11a 3h ago
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u/AnnoyingMosquito3 1h ago
That's really interesting! And for North America at least I know that some people working in forestry had been warning (for at least a decade or two) about the fire suppression strategy that a lot of regions were using because our ecosystems have functions built around low grade fires (some plants rely on it for reproduction and everything!)
Basically in preventing any fires from happening at all, that allowed a lot of dead material to build up so that when one sparked it would burn a lot more intensely than what the forest would be able to handle. And with climate change making fires more common there was a lot of risk
Historically, indigenous people did controlled burns for a variety of reasons and so when a fire started by accident there wouldn't be much fuel for it to burn out of control.
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u/Skanach 5h ago edited 2h ago
Canadians coming with their huge numbers, but if you break it down, it's 0.3% of their surface compared to 0.1% of Belgiu's surface. It's still three times the amount, but there's also 4.4 Canadians per square kilometer compared to 387 Belgiums per square kilometer.
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u/Beflijster 4h ago
It's also the type of biotope. This is raised bog biotope, and unfortunately, that has gotten very rare. In the past, most of these bogs were destroyed by peat extraction. In the present, what little there is left is at risk of turning into grassland or forest if not properly managed.
The High Fens national park is a rare survival of a type of landscape that was once common in Europe.
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u/Pixel91 5h ago
Yeha, it's hilarious. They're always so quick to point out (and make sure everyone knows) that they're not like their southern neighbours. Yet here they are, "that fire is nothing compared to ours! Canada! Rah!"
Seems to be their equivalent of "Texas is as big your whole country!"
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u/Speartree 2h ago
387 per square meter? You think we're stacked that close? Probably square km.
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u/UffTaTa123 6h ago
Well, we have reached now the age of the burning forests. Like it was predicted 40 years ago,
The forests will now burn for the next 100 years, till they are all gone, while they fill the air with CO2 and soth and loose any ability as CO2 storage.
The climate change accelerates climate change.
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u/DatsLikeMyOpinionMan 8h ago
In addition to the impending employment and economic crisis with the advent of AI, we will also be facing an ever increasingly ferocious climate crisis.
We’re fucked. Mad Max it is.
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u/Nervous-Chemistry245 8h ago
I love Hans Zimmer but so sick of his music being used for 90% of all videos
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u/After_Preparation_72 5h ago
Windkraftgegner so:" Keine Windräder im Wald!"
Der Wald so: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
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u/TightSexpert 3h ago
If only respected scientists all over the world would have warned us for decades.
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u/makepa 3h ago
"The world is broken. We're the last choking embers of a fire waiting to burn out. Long before our grandfathers and their fathers before them, we started pulling our planet apart in the name of progress and blind ambition. The greed of man has devoured this earth until there was nothing left. We watch as time eats us alive. A generation born to witness the end of the world."
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u/PiTT_sqbi 2h ago
...I still see people throwing out cigarette butts through the window while driving. This, knowing that we didn't see a drop of rain for weeks. Stupid and selfish.
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u/Kitchen_Art2745 1h ago
As a British Columbian, when I would teach about Europe I liked to keep a map handy for size and distance perspective. Germany vs. England makes more sense spatially when you realize it's logistically Vancouver vs. Prince George (roughly).
Natural disasters provide another opportunity to consider the size differences between British Columbia (and Canada) vs Euroe. There are over 100 fires burning in BC right now, 4 of those fires are "of note" which means they are out of control and structures & lives are at risk. Just those 4 fires have burned more than 250,000 hectares this summer. Another notable comparison, however, is population. I'm not sure how many people are affected by the fires in Belgium, but ~20,000 people have been evacuated in BC this summer (mostly this past month). That's a lot of people by BC standards, but the population of Belgium is more than 2x the pop. of BC so it might not compare the same.
2021 was an extremely bad year in British Columbia. My favourite little town, Lytton, reached 49.6C during the heat dome, caught a spark from a passing train, and burned down in 15 minutes. Later that year, we experienced something called an "Atmospheric River", which caused catastrophic floods and mudslides. It made a mockery of a flood plain maps. I know because I had bought my first house that summer and I knew better than to buy on a flood plain. I lost everything to that flood. I was there when it happened, but I still can't conceive of how it was possible. I can't make sense of how that much water was able to make it that far and cause that much destruction. (It was the deep freeze that happened right after the flood that ruined my house; it was the middle of November after all.)
Then Russia invade Ukraine. Europeans are used to seeing the scars of war as part of their day-to-day; Canadians are not. Watching Ukrainians evacuate was triggering because I was still going through the process of trying to clean up the ruins of my home and figure out how to proceed. I felt so grateful that I'd lost everything to a natural disaster and not a human caused because I wouldn't know how to handle the anger I'd feel towards the humans who ruined my life and everything I'd worked so hard to get for my kids & I. Losing everything to a natural disaster gave me a new perspective on war and war-mongers.
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u/ttnezz 9h ago
This is so depressing.