This year's European wildfire season has produced a headline that sounds almost too strange to be real: fires in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands have been setting off unexploded bombs and mines left over from the two world wars. In the French village of Le Porge, near Bordeaux, a wildfire uncovered roughly 400 shells and pieces of ammunition, mostly old mortar rounds and anti-tank shells, according to French officials; one resident told regional media that a piece of the recovered ordnance had gone straight through a house.
In eastern Belgium's Liège province, the regional governor confirmed sporadic detonations during recent fires, with emergency crews adapting their response around buried munitions. A Dutch bomb-disposal unit was sent to check a forest near a former WWII battle site as flames approached.
This sounds like a problem for a continent with a very different twentieth century, but it matters for insurers. In 2021, construction workers at the University of Exeter unearthed a live German bomb dropped on the city during WWII. It couldn't safely be moved, so bomb disposal experts carried out a controlled detonation, which damaged nearby halls of residence. The University tried to claim under its property policy. Allianz declined, citing the standard market War Exclusion Clause for loss "occasioned by war." The dispute went to the Court of Appeal, which in late 2023 unanimously sided with the insurer. Its reasoning, set out in the full judgment on BAILII, was that the dropping of the bomb in 1942 and the controlled detonation nearly 80 years later were causes of the loss, of roughly equal weight. Because one of those causes fell squarely within the war exclusion, the whole claim was barred. Proximate cause, the court noted, doesn't mean whichever event happened last. “There were two concurrent causes of the loss and damage: the dropping of the bomb and its detonation,” wrote Lord Coulson.
Canadian readers already have their own version of this story. In September 2017, a grass fire at CFB Suffield in southeastern Alberta started when soldiers detonated an old, unexploded artillery shell during a live-fire training exercise, according to CBC and Global News reporting at the time.
The fire jumped the base's perimeter during a province-wide fire ban, burned roughly 36,500 hectares (an area close to half the size of Calgary), destroyed a ranch, and killed more than 160 head of cattle. It prompted a local state of emergency and evacuations near the hamlet of Bindloss. The base commander accepted responsibility, and farmers and ranchers spent months afterward seeking compensation.
CFB Suffield is Canada's largest military training area, and it's far from the only site of its kind. The Department of National Defence's UXO Legacy Sites Program manages unexploded ordnance risk at former training grounds across the country, land used by Canadian and Allied forces during the First and Second World Wars and the Korean War. Some of it, like the former Tracadie Range in New Brunswick, still requires active clearance work. Most of these sites sit in rural, forested or grassland terrain, exactly the kind of landscape that has produced Canada's worst wildfire seasons on record.
The European numbers put this year's fire activity in context. The EU's satellite-based European Forest Fire Information System had already recorded upwards of 500,000 hectares burned across the bloc by early August 2026, ahead of the same point in 2025, itself the worst year on record there. Canada's own 2026 season has been active too: year-to-date burned area had reached roughly 2.95 million hectares by mid-July, above the 10-year average, with Northwestern Ontario and Northern Quebec seeing the heaviest activity. British Columbia and Alberta, the provinces that produced Fort McMurray and Jasper, have so far had a quieter year than usual, though that can change fast.
Most of Canada's UXO legacy sites are well marked, well documented, and actively managed by DND, so this isn't a claim that every rural Alberta or New Brunswick property sits next to a buried shell. The Suffield fire is still a useful case study for anyone assessing wildfire-exposed rural risk. It shows how quickly a controlled, routine military procedure can turn into an uncontrolled fire, a multi-jurisdictional liability question, and a long wait for the people caught in between. Europe's fire crews are living a bigger version of that same problem this summer.
