Residents of the village of Gey in Hürtgenwald have been cleared to go home after a large-scale evacuation forced roughly 1,800 people out of their houses during Germany's most destructive forest fire of the summer. The all-clear appeared on the website of the Düren district administration on Saturday evening, which reported that the situation around the village had "eased to the point that people can return home". According to the district, the fire no longer represents a danger to the settlement.
Gey was evacuated during the night leading into Friday, when the flames were still advancing unpredictably through the surrounding woodland. "We have managed to secure Gey in such a way that the flames cannot spread to the village," said District Administrator Ralf Nolten of the CDU. Officials confirmed that nobody was injured during the emergency and that not a single house was destroyed.
The district administration stressed that the improvement does not mean the fire is out. Flames remained visible at two separate locations, and crews continued to work through hotspots across the affected woodland. Around 1,600 emergency personnel were reported to be operating in the area, up from roughly 1,400 who had been deployed at the height of the operation, when firefighting helicopters were also brought in to drop water over terrain that ground units could barely reach.
The fire is "historic in its dimension for our federal state", said North Rhine-Westphalia's Deputy Minister President Mona Neubaur of the Greens on Saturday. "It covers an area equal to all the forest fires of the past five years put together." She pointed to the exceptional difficulty faced by the crews on the ground, describing conditions "in the most difficult terrain, in the greatest heat, in shifting winds".
State Interior Minister Herbert Reul, also of the CDU, attributed the outbreak to human behaviour rather than natural causes. "The fire was started by some idiot," Reul said during a visit to the crews on site. "That is why you have to think about how irresponsibly people run around in the area and simply throw things away. That is the real problem." He added that he had never seen a forest fire like the one in the Hürtgenwald.
Reul reacted with visible irritation to criticism that North Rhine-Westphalia does not operate its own firefighting aircraft. "These complaints, I have no patience for them any more. Complain afterwards, end of story," he said. From his point of view, the only priority at that moment was keeping the fire under control. "What interests people is whether we can secure their houses," Reul said. "That is all that interests them, and the rest they could not care less about. And the question of aircraft — I have already discussed that ten times."
State Agriculture Minister Silke Gorißen issued a direct warning to the public in an interview with Deutschlandfunk. "Please simply stay out of the forests," the minister appealed. She explained that a discarded cigarette butt or a piece of glass left behind is often enough to trigger a forest fire, particularly because the extreme dryness acts as an accelerant.
Gorißen also signalled that investigators may be looking at the possibility of deliberate ignition. "We do see it when different seats of fire come up relatively simultaneously or in close succession," she said. "It makes you suspicious." She added that no confirmed findings are available at this stage.
Minister President Hendrik Wüst framed the fire as evidence of why action against climate change matters. "We are experiencing this kind of large fire here for the first time, but we are not experiencing this extreme weather situation for the first time," he said. "And that does have something to do with climate change. Nobody can seriously deny that any more." The state, he said, will "have to deal with extreme weather events of very different kinds more frequently in the future".
The fire broke out on Thursday in the Hürtgenwald near Düren, southwest of Cologne. In its early phase the flames travelled rapidly, driven hard by gusty winds. According to emergency services, the advance was halted during the night leading into Saturday. Light rain that fell on Saturday afternoon was expected to work in favour of the crews still tackling the remaining hotspots.
The Hürtgenwald emergency is part of a broader pattern that has kept fire services occupied nationwide. Persistent heat and a prolonged lack of rainfall have fuelled numerous forest and open-land fires over recent days, with temperatures well above 30 degrees Celsius recorded across large parts of Germany.
The German Forestry Council has responded to the rising number of incidents by pressing for targeted forest conversion alongside improved early detection. "This year we have to acknowledge that forest fires are occurring more frequently and are now also reaching regions that we have not previously counted among Germany's classic forest fire areas," Council President Christian Haase told the Rheinische Post in its Saturday edition.
"Climate change is advancing faster than we long assumed, and faster than our forest ecosystems can adapt to it," Haase continued. "The most important long-term answer is therefore: forest conversion, forest conversion, forest conversion." What is needed, he said, are structurally rich, multi-layered mixed forests with a higher share of broadleaf timber and vigorous natural regeneration.
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