Wildfires expose — and detonate — buried bombs and mines from WWI and WWII
Published: 22 August 2026
By Sam McNeil
Associated Press
via the ABC News website
Unexploded bomb
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)
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
ELSENBORN, Belgium — 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.
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.
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