Alberta wildfires now cover the size of Hong Kong, force 88,000 to flee from now-devastated Canadian city
Wildfires ravaging the center of Canada’s oil production region in northern Alberta continued to grow, covering more than 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) as police shepherd convoys of families to safety through the now-devastated town of Fort McMurray.
The fire is spreading north and south, covering an area almost the size of Hong Kong, forcing evacuations from oil camps where Fort McMurray residents had fled earlier this week, police said.
As residents continue to flee, officials warned it will double in size in the next 24 hours.
The wildfire has disrupted rescue convoy. The ferocity of the fire was unprecedented, said Chad Morrison, a senior wildfire manager for the Alberta government.
“This is an extreme, rare fire event, that is something that is historic for us,” Morrison said at a press conference in Edmonton, flanked by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and a brigadier general from Canada’s military. “There is no amount of resources we are going to be able to put on this fire that can hold it.”
As many as 25,000 of Fort McMurray’s 80,000 evacuated residents had gone north to oil-sands work camps before the fires overtook the town, cutting them off from the rest of the country. That area is no longer guaranteed safe, federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said. Police began escorting convoys of 50 vehicles at a time through the fire zone Friday morning, working to get the 10,000 people to safety in towns south of the city.
Sam Osterhagen, a welder who was working near the oil hub, spent the bulk of his 40th birthday in the convoy of vehicles after lining up early in the morning. He and his coworkers were stuck for the last three nights at a campsite north of town, watching as the fires burned in the distance. It looked like an orange ball glowing in the distance, with flames a couple hundred feet high, they said.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Osterhagen said, after stopping with his buddies to grab a burger at Wally’s Fast Food in Grasslands on Highway 55, about halfway from Fort McMurray to Edmonton. It had taken them seven hours to drive a distance that would normally take two.
Passing through Fort McMurray, the men could see vast swaths of burned-out forest and homes and buildings destroyed, though the downtown seemed to be intact, they said. The smoke was thick in the air and embers glowed in the burned brush along the roadside until they got well south of town, they said.
“They are dealing with an absolute beast of a fire, it’s one of the worst we’ve ever seen,” Goodale said at a press conference in Toronto. “The situation is still evolving, it’s still very dangerous.”
The inferno around Fort McMurray has destroyed homes and businesses, disrupted Western Canada’s oil-sands operations and may become the costliest catastrophe in the country’s history with insurance losses potentially reaching C$9.4 billion ($7.3 billion). Bank of Montreal cut its second-quarter gross domestic product growth estimate to zero from 1.5 percent, citing “severe disruptions to oil production” due to the fires. BMO said the estimate was a placeholder, dependent on receiving more information on the scope of the disaster.
‘Unquantifiable’ Cost
The economic cost of the disaster is “unquantifiable,” Goodale said, but it will be “far-reaching and deep.”
Alberta has already set aside C$100 million to help families affected by the blaze, Notley said. Fort McMurray, which was once a bustling hub of activity for oil and gas workers, now sits empty and will not be safe for a long time, she said.
“The wildfire situation is still volatile and sudden road closures are still possible,” Alberta’s emergency management authority said on its website. New fires were still starting and high winds threatened to keep stoking the blaze, creating even more work for the firefighters battling the wildfire. Environment Canada said temperatures would rise to 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday, with a 40 percent chance of rain on Sunday and Monday, followed by cooler temperatures.
Oil Crash
The wildfire is the latest blow to a province already grappling with the economic toll of a two-year oil price slump in one of the world’s most expensive places to extract crude. More than 40,000 energy jobs have been lost in Canada since the price crash began in 2014, pushing the provincial economy into recession.
Royal Bank of Canada estimated that as much as 1 million barrels a day of production was shut because of the blaze, or about 40 percent of oil sands output, as companies including Suncor Energy Inc., Cnooc Ltd.’s Nexen, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and ConocoPhillips reduce production and open work camps to residents escaping blazes in the Alberta’s biggest-ever evacuation. Inter Pipeline Ltd. shut part of its system in the province. The disruptions pushed up the price of oil sands crude.
Oil Sands
Major oil-sands sites are near Fort McMurray and are concentrated to the north while the fire is to the south. Fire danger to their operations is likely to be minimal. Most of Alberta’s oil and gas facilities have their own fire-fighting crews and have physical defenses against wildfires, such as gravel fields and fire breaks, Morrison said.
The prediction for the next two days is for the fire to move away to the northeast. That would move the blaze away from communities and industrial areas, out into uninhabited forest.
There are a total of 36 fires burning, down from 49 Thursday, with five considered “out of control,” according to government estimates. Some 1,255 firefighters, 143 helicopters, and 27 air tankers are fighting the fires.
Source: GulfNews