So far, no deaths have been reported.
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“If it’s constantly changing direction in different ways, it’s hard to control a fire”, Jones said.
He previously tweeted: “My thoughts are with people affected by the fire in Fort McMurray tonight”.
Officials said very hot and dry conditions meant “extreme wildfire behaviour” on all fronts around the fire.
Fort McMurray sits near the third-largest reserves of oil in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
As rain poured down in Raleigh Thursday afternoon, Matthews wished it would fall in Alberta, to help control the fires.
The fire has proven to be as capricious as it has been hellacious, leveraging high winds to level neighbourhoods in the south and southwest, transforming homes that once housed families into smoky wastelands of concrete, rebar and ash.
There were haunting images of scorched trucks, charred homes and telephone poles, burned out from the bottom up, hanging in the wires like little wooden crosses.
They had arrived in Anzac late Tuesday after being evacuated from their homes 30 miles (50 kilometers) north in Fort McMurray. “And that clearly told me it was time to go”.
Firefighters in the western Canadian city of Fort McMurray are scrambling to contain a raging fire that has forced the evacuation of all 80,000 residents. Some vehicles sat in ditches, the victims of engine trouble or a lack of petrol.
Notley called it the biggest evacuation in the history of the province.
“The footage we’ve seen, the cars racing down highways while fire rages on all sides is nothing short of terrifying”, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told lawmakers in Ottawa. Two babies were born at one evacuation center on Tuesday. “This is going to take a while to recover”. Trudeau said he’s offered the province his government’s full support. Now, she’s encouraging people in her adopted hometown of Raleigh to make donations to the Canadian Red Cross. A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta on Wednesday, May 4, 2016.
While US commercial crude oil inventories rose in the same week, investors focused more on hopes the production decline would help ease the global supply glut.
Mandatory evacuations of workers have halted some operations, while camps created to house temporary workers are being used to house the thousands of people fleeing the fires.
Matthews said her aunt and uncle could only drive north as they escaped the fire because the highway going south towards the nearest large city- Edmonton- was gridlocked. “They’re focusing on taking care of each other, their families, their neighbors”. “These are huge numbers to be dealing with and it’s a challenge to get an exact tally of how many people have been evacuated and where they have gone”.
About 2,500 evacuees had been registered in the small community near Fort McMurray.
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“Since Fort McMurray is almost 10 times the size of Slave Lake, a disaster of the same magnitude impacting almost all of Fort McMurray could potentially lead to C$9 billion in insured industry losses”, MacKinnon said in a research note. Much of the oil-rich material is located underground.
