Dozens of people were evacuated from homes and vacation parks in eastern England on Thursday as fire crews tackled a wildfire around four miles from a nuclear power plant.
The blaze began on Wednesday afternoon and engulfed almost 250 acres of land at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk, a scenic area of protected heathland on England’s eastern coast.
Emergency responders declared it a major incident, which in Britain means an event with serious consequences that require extraordinary measures by one or more agencies.
The local fire service said that there was “no current risk” to the nearby nuclear plant, known as Sizewell B, because of the fire’s distance from it “and the direction it is traveling.” It added, “However, this is a live and dynamic situation.”
About 70 firefighters were initially deployed on Wednesday. On Thursday, the fire service said that “firefighting operations have been strengthened in response to changing wind conditions,” that 18 fire vehicles were involved and that around 200 trailers at a vacation park had been evacuated.
No deaths or injuries have been reported. The Suffolk police urged people to avoid the area and a nearby beach as the blaze spread.
The wildfire is one of around 200 to have broken out in England and Wales in the last two weeks amid warnings that the country is unprepared for the growing risk posed by a changing climate.
In Scotland, emergency responders are still battling a wildfire that began more than two weeks ago at the Cairngorms National Park.
After requesting help from the British military, the head of Scotland’s government, First Minister John Swinney, said in a statement on Sunday that he had been told that the British defense ministry “does not possess aerial firefighting assets stationed within the U.K.,” raising concerns about Britain’s readiness for increasingly severe wildfires.
In Suffolk, the Fire and Rescue Service issued photos of their teams dousing scorched land as fire burned through vegetation.
“Crews will continue to fight fire in the local area for the next probably 24 to 48 hours due to the size and complexity of the incident we face, and we still are in a major incident,” Christopher May, a commander of the service, said in a statement on Thursday.
EDF, the French energy company that runs Sizewell B, said in a statement, “The fire at Dunwich Heath is not currently affecting operations at Sizewell B power station but we are continuing to monitor the situation — we are not on high alert.”
In addition to Sizewell B, a new nuclear power plant called Sizewell C, which will be majority-owned by the British government, is being constructed in the area. A statement from Sizewell C said that it was “closely monitoring the fire” but that the flames currently posed a low risk to the plant because of “its distance from the site and the watercourses in between.”
On Wednesday, the environmental agency declared a drought in half of England, with millions of people asked to restrict their water use. In July, the country received just 7 percent of expected rainfall, the agency said, warning that there was no substantial rain on the way. A drought was also declared across all of Wales on Thursday.
On Wednesday, the London fire service said crews had attended 63 grass fires across the city within 24 hours.
The exceptionally hot and dry summer has had other negative effects. On Thursday, the country’s Health Security Agency estimated there were 2,877 deaths linked to the temperature during two heat waves in May and June, almost double the figure for all of 2025.
