“It was quite overwhelming in some spots”, she said.
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Morrison said air tankers, helicopters and bulldozers had kept the blaze from reaching a Suncor Energy Inc facility, which Suncor identified as its base oil sands mining site north of Fort McMurray, and a Syncrude facility. Oil sands mines are cleared and have no vegetation.
“Residents of Fort McMurray should not expect to return home for an extended period of time”, the government said in a statement. “I am hoping, in all of this crisis, to spend a few minutes today with my own children”, Notley said, pausing as her voice cracked.
“The majority of production has stopped, certainly not all of it, but the majority”.
Even though progress has been made, officials say the fire is about the size of the state of Rhode Island. Its workers largely live in Fort McMurray, a former frontier outpost-turned-city whose residents mostly come from elsewhere in Canada.
Meanwhile, there’s been an outpouring of generosity from across the country, as Canadians fill warehouses with donations for evacuees.
More than 2,400 homes and buildings were destroyed in the blaze and the entire town had to be evacuated – but 25,000 other properties, including the hospital, every school and municipal buildings, had been saved.
Numerous employees of the big petroleum companies active in the area come from other parts of Canada and have returned home. That includes areas already burned and now burning.
The largest-producing oil projects in the Fort McMurray area are about 20km north of the town and not in the fire’s current path.
Allen said at one point the fire raced down a hill to the corner of a bank, but firefighters were able to halt the encroaching flames at the bank. Together they will create a start-up plan to help the companies get back on track. One exhausted fireman told CBC television that members of his team were working up to 40 hours at a stretch without sleep. Some will be more hard and will be a week or two. “Whatever we tried to do, it went a different way and it found some new fuel so we our very best”.
The statements from Ms. Notley, Mr. Williams and other industry leaders at a press conference Tuesday were the first effort to put forward a timeline for resuming operations of affected companies. Already, 60 vulnerable residents have been moved while about 450 residents remain, Notley said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau planned to visit Fort McMurray on Friday.
Although the wildfire was enormous, no deaths or injuries have been reported – though two people died from traffic accidents during the mass evacuation.
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Five hundred firefighters employing 15 helicopters and 14 air tankers have been struggling to contain the massive blaze, which has already forced at least 90,000 residents to evacuate, a lot of them from Fort McMurray, which is under a mandatory evacuation order, along with Anzac, Gregoire Lake Estates and Fort McMurray First Nation.
