Chad Morrison of Alberta Wildfire said last night he was “very happy” and called it great firefighting weather after some rain fell and cooler temperatures were on the way. The massive wildfire in Alberta Province has covered more than 2,000 square kilometers by Saturday and forced nearly 100,000 residents to evacuate.
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“We have teams with vast amount of experience in doing this and those folks are all re-enforcing the Fort McMurray re-entry plan”, he said.
Some 100,000 people were forced to flee in and around the hard hit city of Fort McMurray, the epicenter of a fast-running wildfire and northern Alberta’s oil sands region.
Mr Yurdiga said while most of the city was intact the area was still too unsafe for residents to return home. About 30,000 of the displaced are in Edmonton, 5,000 in Calgary and 2,000 in Lac La Biche, Premier Rachel Notely told reporters Monday.
About 20 percent of homes in the city of Fort McMurray, Canada, were destroyed in a devastating wildfire, a Canadian member of Parliament said.
The final evacuations of 25,000 people who headed north from Fort McMurray after the blaze began was completed on Sunday.
Large areas of town have no power, water, and gas, he said.
Scott Long, the executive director of operations at Alberta Emergency Management, said Sunday that officials would “get a much better handle on number of structures up” within the coming week.
Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale urged evacuees to be patient.
Alberta premier Rachel Notley said the fire has grown to almost 400,000 acres (625 square miles) as of Sunday and has destroyed more than 1,600 structures.
“The city was surrounded by an ocean of fire only a few days ago”, she said.
No deaths or injuries have been reported from the fire, but two people died in traffic accidents during the mass evacuation.
Officials made it clear that it was too early to put a timeline on getting thousands of evacuees camped out in nearby towns back to Fort McMurray soon, even if their homes are intact.
Taylor says the idea came from conversations with his Canadian manager Sam Feldman as he arrived for a 15-concert tour of Canadian cities over the next month.
If the blaze can’t be stopped, it may reach neighboring province of Saskatchewan.
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The second most-costly natural disaster was the ice storm of 1998 in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which caused about C$1.6 billion in insured losses, the company said. About half of the crude output from the sands, or 1 million barrels per day, has been taken offline, according to a Reuters estimate.
