“Unfortunately that did not extend to the Fort McMurray area”, she said.
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Municipal Affairs Min. Danielle Larivee said that evacuated work camps are actively being inspected for re-opening potential.
A number of evacuation orders have been lifted in Canada’s wildfire-ravaged oilfields after rain and cold weather helped dampen the flames.
Syncrude Canada, owned by a consortium that includes Suncor, is also moving to restart operations.
ConocoPhillips said it started a staged re-mobilization plan at Surmont, and by Friday expected to have 350 people back on site, though there was no immediate indication of its schedule for restarting production, a spokesman said on Monday. The company had cleared out three sites that account for the bulk of its upstream production: the base plant mine, MacKay River and Firebag facilities. On Saturday, the Alberta government said the blaze, nicknamed “the Beast”, held steady at about 5,000 square kilometres, though much of it has moved east of Fort McMurray.
Oil-sands operators took more than 1 million barrels a day of output offline this month as a wildfire forced the evacuation of workers and the shutdown of pipelines and power supplies. It is calculated as the rate of heat energy released over time at the front of the fire, and this fire at times reached five times a level considered extreme, he said.
And with no significant rain in two to three months – combined with warm forecast this week – it’s going to stay tough.
“Around 1,000 more firefighters should be no the ground in the next two weeks from across Canada, the USA, and South Africa”, explains Larivee.
The fire destroyed a 665-room lodge for oil sands workers on Tuesday, before blazing eastward towards other camps. Officials said the orders were lifted because “conditions have improved in areas north of Fort McMurray”.
Fighting massive forest fires is risky and taxing enough, but those sent into Canada’s oil sands are not only wrestling with one of the worst wildfires in the country’s history.
It may have been a typical wet May long weekend in and around Edmonton but firefighters battling the blaze near Fort McMurray are still holding out hope for more rain.
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“You are returning to a community that was profoundly affected by a wildfire”, the government pamphlet said.
