Two fires have been approaching the border, the closest about 22km away, officials told CBC.
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Chad Morrison of Alberta Wildfire says extreme fire conditions will persist for the next two days.
The fire grew to its massive size thanks to regional conditions including heat, winds, and a lack of recent rainfall, conditions that could persist given the province’s recent climate history, University of California, Los Angeles geography professor and climate specialist Glen MacDonald told The Christian Science Monitor last week. And it has allowed them to further protect fire-ravaged Fort McMurray. Jihad Moghrabi, a spokesman for Lac La Biche County, said 4,400 evacuees have come through The Bold Center, a sports facility in town.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Premier Rachel Notley confirmed the fire had grown to more than 161,000 hectares, a massive stretch of land almost 13 times the size of the City of Vancouver.
Officials say the huge quarter of a million acre blaze could double. Some 1,600 structures are believed to have been lost.
There are about 19,000 people already evacuated from the affected areas. “Our treatment plant is functioning”.
A burned bicycle lays on the ground in a residential neighborhood of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada on May 7, 2016. “Some areas you don’t even know there was a fire”.
It rained on Sunday. Notley retweeted the picture and wrote “Here’s hoping for much more!”
“This remains a big, out of control, risky fire”, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said.
“Once the immediate fire damage is completed there will be an enormous amount of work to do to make [Fort McMurray] safe and habitable”, she said.
The blaze prompted the mass evacuation of 80,000 people from the oil city of Fort McMurray, most of whom fled south.
The fire continued to burn on Sunday, a week after it started near Fort McMurray in northeast Alberta a week earlier. As of Sunday, two people have died in a vehicle crash while fleeing the fire. Her voiced cracked when talking about the two and noted it is Mother’s Day.
She said that they have a security system on their house, so they had been able to log in and could see that their house was still standing.
There was still no timeline, however, for getting Fort McMurray’s 88,000 inhabitants back into what remains of their town.
Alberta’s Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee said the fire was still out of control and warned residents not to try to return.
Syncrude, a major oil sands mining company in Alberta, is shutting down operations and removing all personnel from their site because of the massive wildfire in the area.
Quite how quickly Fort McMurray can recover is unclear.
Authorities planned to airlift about 8,000 of the 25,000 evacuees who were initially chased north of Fort McMurray. The federal government and the Alberta government have committed to match the donations. Officials then moved everyone south Friday and Saturday.
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Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Kevin Kunetzki said police were canvassing every residence in Fort McMurray and had completed about 30 percent of that work.
