Brecht fire, April 2021 Brecht, Wuustwezel
The fire started on 23 April 2021 in Brecht, Belgium, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 588 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.
The only fire in Belgium with a page in 2021.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 588ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 1day
- 23 Apr 2021 – 23 Apr 2021
- Municipalities hit
- 2
- municipalities
- Started on
- 23 Apr
- 2021
- Heat detections
- 54
- in a single hotspot: 186 MW
- Danger at start
- 4
- Very low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 1.8GW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
23 Apr 2021 · 1,795 MW · 54
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.7 mm on 28 Apr.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Brecht where it started571 ha reached on 23 Apr6.2 %
-
17 ha reached on 23 Apr0.2 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
What burned
- Other natural land89 %
- Mixed forest6.3 %
- Scrub and transitional woodland3.6 %
- Agricultural areas0.7 %
- Coniferous forest0.5 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 100 %
- ZEPA De Maatjes, Wuustwezelheide en Groot Schietveld BE2101437
- LIC Klein en Groot Schietveld BE2100016
Natura 2000 sites (European Environment Agency, 2024 release) crossed by the perimeter.
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.12 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2020, satellite-based estimate).
This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.
Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu
The weather day by day
ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.
Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Apr | 14.4 °C | 44 % | 26 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 4 |
| 24 Apr after | 13.7 °C | 42 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 25 Apr after | 11.6 °C | 48 % | 36 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 26 Apr after | 13.8 °C | 37 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 27 Apr after | 16.0 °C | 30 % | 28 km/h | 0.2 mm | Low 8 |
| 28 Apr after | 18.0 °C | 30 % | 32 km/h | 1.7 mm | Very low 4 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.
Detections table · 54Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Brecht fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 23 April 2021 and 23 April 2021: 1 day between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 588 hectares (5.9 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 2 municipalities: Brecht (571 ha, 6.2 %); Wuustwezel (17 ha, 0.2 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 14.4 °C, humidity dropped to 44 % and gusts hit 26 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 4, class Very low.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Belgium (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
Where to verify it
A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.
Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›
Satellite cross-check
History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
No changes since 24 October 2026.
Does something look wrong on this page?
This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.
Report an error
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 54 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
- Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.
Where this data comes from
The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM4 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.