​What started as a manageable brush fire outside of the city of Fort McMurray now threatens the center of the Canadian oil sands. As of Friday, over 80,000 people have been evacuated from the northeast Alberta boomtown, with thousands more waiting to be airlifted out. Currently, there have been no deaths or injuries directly related to the fire — though one girl was killed in car accident while trying to evacuate.

How did this fire start and what caused it to spread so quickly? How will Canadian authorities control the blaze and what's will be the economic impact? Here's what to read to make sense of it all.

Officials said tinder-dry brush, low humidity, and hot, gusting winds left crews unable to stop the massive conflagration. The blaze, which erupted on Sunday, grew more than tenfold from 18,500 acres (7,500 hectares) on Wednesday to some 210,000 acres (85,000 hectares) on Thursday, an area roughly 10 times the size of Manhattan. The dry weather conditions prompted the province to issue a fire ban for parks and protected areas on Thursday.

[Reuters]

Chad Morrison, Alberta's manager of wildfire prevention, said there was a "high potential that the fire could double in size" by the end of Saturday. He expected the fire to expand into a more remote forested area northeast and away from Fort McMurray. Extremely dry conditions and a hot temperature of 27 Celsius (81 Fahrenheit) was expected Saturday along with strong winds, he said.

[ABC News]

While the wildfire threatens production of Fort McMurray's bitumen extraction, it is most certainly not to blame, writes Aritha van Herk in the Guardian:

In this warm-hearted and hard-working community live teachers and waitresses and doctors and policewomen and yoga instructors, the spectrum of every neighbourhood; there are streets and houses and people and yards, dogs and children and coffee shops. Fort McMurray is more than an environmental hotspot, more than a metonymy for oil sands, more than a grail for jobseekers and grifters… So get it straight. The oil sands are not on fire – and we can only pray that the wildfires do not compromise industrial sites. Fort McMurray is important not only because it is the touchstone for arguments about resource extraction, but because it is so quintessentially Canadian – diverse, hard working and optimistic, a place determined to live up to its potential, and beyond.

[The Guardian]





First responders hoped lead convoys of vehicles through a devastated Fort McMurray on Thursday, but opted to wait until the fire had moved on to spare residents from having to flee amongst a burning city. The CBC reports on the current evacuation plan:

After three days stranded in oilsands work camps north of city, thousands of families are expected be escorted south through their fire-ravaged community. From there, many will make their way on to Edmonton or Calgary, to be housed in evacuation centres or with family or friends.



Thousands of people hoped to do just that Thursday, but with fire and smoke threatening the highway from both sides of the road, RCMP held firm at a roadblock north of the city. As the day wore on, the stalemate led to frustration and rising tempers.

[CBC]





High winds, high temperatures and low humidity created turned the surrounding wilderness into a near tinderbox. Here, the Globe and Mail details this "perfect storm":

The weather, the type of trees in the local forest, the time of the year and the kind of fire propagation were all indicators that the flames would be hard to tame, jumping over the Athabasca and Hangingstone rivers as they spread northward into the city. "The fire's behaviour was beyond all control efforts," Bernie Schmitte, wildfire manager at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry told reporters later in the night. To make things worse, there had been an inversion, a weather condition where hot air at higher altitude traps down the smoke. However, by the end of the morning, the inversion reversed, Mr. Schmitte said, which would have fanned the flames and smoke further.

[The Globe And Mail]





As the fire continues to spread, Maclean's is updating a series of maps that compare the area of the wildfire to that of major cites in the Canada and the US. It's a simple, effective way of understanding the scale of the blaze. Here's just one example:

[Maclean's]





The Boston Globe has a series of images of the blaze, the measures to control it, areas it's devastated and the relief effort. The images, all which have been pulled from various wire sources, are the most complete visual documentation of the fire.

[The Boston Globe]





Footage From An Evacuee's Car

This video, taken while evacuees flee through a burning Fort McMurray is, at times, hard to watch.

At least in terms of financial damage, Bloomberg reports:

The wildfires spreading around Canada's oil-sands hub of Fort McMurray may become the costliest catastrophe in the country's history with losses potentially reaching C$9.4 billion ($7.3 billion). Insurance losses could reach that high if nearly all homes, cars, and businesses in the Fort McMurray area were destroyed and owners filed a claim to insurers, according to a research note to clients from Bank of Montreal analyst Tom MacKinnon.

[Bloomberg]





The high oil prices in recent years turned expensive crude oil extraction methods — such as Fort McMurray's oil sand operation where thick tar sands are laboriously refined into crude — into a lucrative business. Now, will low oil prices, the once-boomtown is facing a downturn. Outside Magazine spoke with one of Fort McMurray's residents on the double impact of oil prices and the fire:

Jason's a heavy equipment mechanic, servicing vehicles used on the oil sands north of town. He doesn't know if his house is still there, or if it will be there tomorrow. If he goes back after this to find the tools he needs to do his job are gone, he'll have a hard time finding work. "The sad part for this town is that it already got hit because of the downturn in oil prices," Jason continues. "So it took a really big hit, and a lot of people have already left. And now this fire is just decimating the the livelihoods and houses that are left. Some sections of town are just gone."

[Outside]





Canadian authorities are now hoping that forecasted rain will give them a foothold in the fight against the wildfire, according to a report from the National Post:

Three hundred firefighters on the ground and dozens more in the air continue to battle the most destructive wildfire Alberta has experienced in more than a century but, despite their best efforts, officials concede they are no match for the blaze. Thursday, the city's fire chief and Alberta government officials admitted it was resisting most — but not all — containment efforts; it was becoming too large and too fierce for the 22 water bombers and other heavy equipment deployed to douse the fast-spreading flames. "Let me be clear: air tankers are not going to stop this fire," Chad Morrison of Alberta Forestry said at a briefing in Edmonton. "(The fire) is going to continue to push through these dry conditions until we actually get some significant rain."

[The National Post]