The uncontrolled fire, which has consumed swathes of the city including an estimated 1,600 structures, has shut oil production in the area, driving up global oil prices and affecting projects and pipelines across the heavily forested region. A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta on Wednesday, May 4, 2016.
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“We’ve seen people in tinder dry conditions flick cigarettes into a ditch, and as a group of firefighters we’ve actually pulled people over and basically given them our opinions”.
“Let me be clear: air tankers are not going to stop this fire”, he said.
As for the weather, today’s forecast is nothing but bad news for crews.
Luckily, said Cox, another motorist helped him and soon they found themselves fleeing through a frightening landscape that reminded him of the “Mad Max” movies and “The Grapes of Wrath”.
Poitras said fires make it too unsafe to ship fuel and other supplies north of the city to help thousands of people who have been stranded since Monday. Residents are told to head either north or south, depending on their location, on the one highway through town.
Alberta Wildfire outlined how the wildfire grew so quickly on Wednesday night – saying winds kicked up, with gusts of up to 70 kilometres an hour. By Thursday it was nearly nine times that at 850 square kilometres – roughly equivalent to the size of Calgary. That’s the day when fires first reached the city – Alberta’s main hub for petroleum extraction. If Fort McMurray were the face of a clock, flames surrounded it from the numbers four to 11. The province hopes to transport many of those people, who fled Fort McMurray two days ago, by aircraft to Edmonton, the provincial capital and the closest major city 435 km to the south.
An airlift of evacuees began from oil facility airstrips on Thursday. About 25,000 remained in oilfield work camps north of the city, while the rest had moved south to stay in hotels, in campgrounds, with friends or in designated centres that included Edmonton.
The premier said Thursday morning that 18 new wildfires had started in the forest protection area on Wednesday and as of 8 a.m. Thursday, there were a total of 49 wildfires burning in Alberta: 7 were considered out of control, 12 were being held, 23 were under control and seven had been turned over to local firefighters.
“To those people who have been displaced from their homes, I want you to know that we have your back. You will be supported”.
Frightened evacuees north of the city took to Twitter, asking when they would be able to drive south and whether areas to the north were safe.
Scott Long, with the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, says they would move out the most vulnerable – about eight-thousand or so – by air.
“Fort McMurray is a place where Canadians have come from all across this country”.
About 250 firefighters and 12 helicopters are battling the blaze. There was still no indication of injury or death from the fires.
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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. They have focused on protecting key infrastructures like the water treatment plant, the hospital and the airport.
