European wildfires expose, detonate buried explosives from past wars

August 22, 2026 / 8:35 AM EDT / CBS/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. Steady temperatures and predictable rainfall once ensured that most buried weapons stayed dormant . But this wildfire season was supercharged by heavy rains in January that spurred vegetation growth, which became kindling when the summer heat arrived.

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