Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said the battle against the fire has stabilized to the point where she and the mayor will tour Fort McMurray’s fire-ravaged neighborhoods. “We’ve saved over 25,000”. Officials said there is no timeline to return residents to the city, but the provincial government is sending in a team on Monday to do preliminary planning. Beyond a blue metal sign that says “Welcome to Fort McMurray”, the charred remains of trees turn the landscape black.
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Notley warned in her update people should not try to return yet.
Two deaths have been reported due to the wildfire, Notley said, both in traffic accidents during the evacuation last week. Many others have not indicated their location.
Ms Notley said around 90% of buildings in Fort McMurray had survived the disaster, including the hospital and most of the schools.
Regional leaders and journalists got their first close-up look Monday at the cataclysmic landscape left behind by the raging wildfire in Alberta – and they saw hope. Some neighbourhoods, including Beacon Hill, are nearly completely levelled. A few structures on the edge of downtown were lost, but the vast majority was saved.
The number of structures damaged or destroyed in the Fort McMurray wildfire stands at 2,400. “They’re rewriting their formulas on how fires behave based on this fire”.
Alberta Health Services Dr. Chris Sikora said a stomach virus broke out among 40 to 50 evacuees at the Northlands evacuation center in Edmonton where 600 people are staying and where up to 6,000 meals a day are being prepared for evacuees staying at hotels or with family and friends.
The fire covered 1610sq km on Sunday morning, said Ms Notley, and was about 30-40km from the neighbouring province, Saskatchewan.
Temperatures are expected to be cloudy and cool with highs in the 40s and 50s through Thursday.
“The cold front has brought a lot of precipitation to a lot of the province, which significantly reduced the fire danger”, Wildfire Information Officer Matthew Anderson told CTV.
Morrison of Alberta Wildfire called the forecast “great firefighting weather”. Fifteen-year-old Emily Ryan and her stepmother’s nephew, Aaron Hodgson, died in the accident. “It was a fire like I’ve never seen in my life”, he said on the media bus.
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But Imperial Oil Ltd on Monday completed a controlled shutdown of its Kearl oil sands mining project, adding it would remain shut until the company had fully grasped the logistics of getting people and materials to and from the site.
