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)
\n\nELSENBORN, Belgium (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.
\n\nSome 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.
\n\nSmoke rises from a field scorched by a wildfire near Waimes, Belgium, Aug. 17, 2026. (Photo AP/Marius Burgelman, File)
\n\nFueled 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.
\n\n“Climate change is now doing the work of unburying and reactivating what was previously stable,” Njeri…
Original source: https://apnews.com/business