Fire unstoppable, Canada city's 88,000 out

People fleeing wildfires in and around Fort McMurray get off a bus Wednesday at an evacuation center in Edmonton, Alberta.
People fleeing wildfires in and around Fort McMurray get off a bus Wednesday at an evacuation center in Edmonton, Alberta.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta -- Alberta declared a state of emergency Wednesday as a wildfire emptied the main city in Canada's oil sands region, destroying entire neighborhoods of Fort McMurray, where officials warned Wednesday that all efforts to suppress the fire have failed.

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AP/The Canadian Press

Towering walls of smoke dwarf a firefighting helicopter Wednesday as it battles a raging wildfi re at Fort McMurray, Alberta, the main city in Canada’s oil sands region. Authorities said all efforts to suppress what one fire official called “a nasty, dirty fire” have failed. About 1,600 structures have been destroyed or damaged and 88,000 people evacuated.

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AP

A map showing the location of Canadian wildfire.

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AP/The Canadian Press

An evacuee puts fuel in his car Wednesday on his way out of Fort McMurray, Alberta, as a wildfire burns in the background. The raging wildfire emptied Canada’s main oil sands city, destroying neighborhoods of Fort McMurray, where officials warned efforts to suppress the fire have failed.

About 88,000 residents fled as flames moved into the city, about 265 miles north of Edmonton. No injuries have been reported.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said all 105 patients at the hospital had been safely airlifted to other care centers. She said that so far, the fire had destroyed or damaged an estimated 1,600 structures.

The fire appeared near the airport late Wednesday. All commercial flights in and out of Fort McMurray have been suspended.

Unseasonably high temperatures combined with dry conditions have transformed the boreal forest in much of Alberta into a tinderbox.

Danielle Larivee, Alberta's minister of municipal affairs, said the fire is burning in residential areas. More than 250 firefighters are battling the blaze. Fatalities have been reported from a collision on a nearby highway but she didn't know whether it was related to the evacuation or fire.

"This is a nasty, dirty fire," Fort McMurray Fire Chief Darby Allen said. "There are certainly areas of the city that have not been burned, but this fire will look for them and it will find them and it will want to take them."

Officials estimated the fire at 18,500 acres and said they expect it to worsen as strong winds and high temperatures "will again create explosive conditions."

The main areas of focus are on protecting critical infrastructure, including the only bridge across the Athabasca River and a long stretch of Alberta 63, the only major route to the city in or out.

"It's a possibility that we may lose a large portion of the town," said Scott Long of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency. He said flames are being kept from the downtown area thanks to the "herculean" efforts of firefighters.

Notley called it the biggest evacuation in the history of the province. She flew up to survey the situation, while officials in the evacuation center had to bolt to the south of the city as flames edged closer.

Notley tweeted pictures of the fire from above. "The view from the air is heartbreaking," she wrote.

The blaze essentially cut Fort McMurray in two late Tuesday, forcing about 10,000 north to the safety of oil sands work camps. About 70,000 headed south in bumper-to-bumper traffic down Alberta 63.

Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale called it one of the largest fire evacuations in Canadian history, if not the largest. "It's a community of 88,000 people that's been totally evacuated," Goodale said. "This is going to take a while to recover."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said while the full extent of the damage isn't yet known he called it "absolutely devastating" and said there's loss on a scale that's hard to imagine. Trudeau said he's offered the province his government's full support. He encouraged Canadians to support friends and donate to the Red Cross.

"We will be there for them," Trudeau said.

The defense minister, Harjit Sajjan, told reporters on a conference call that the military was standing by to offer whatever assistance was requested. Alberta is home to several large military bases, meaning that troops, equipment and aircraft are relatively close at hand.

Helicopters and airplanes dropped water and chemical suppressants, but the speed of the fire's progress and frequent shifts in its direction have so far made it too dangerous to tackle from the ground, said Laura Stewart, a spokesman for the provincial government.

The Alberta oil sands are the third-largest reserves of oil in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Most oil sands projects are well north of the community, while the worst of the flames were on the city's south side. Allen said he's not aware of any threat to oil facilities but called the fire a "moving animal."

Shell said it has shut down production at its Albian Sands mining operations-- about 60 miles north of the city -- so the oil company can focus on getting families out of the region. Suncor, the largest oil sands operator, said it is reducing production at its regional facility -- about 15 miles north of the city.

Chelsie Klassen, a spokesman for The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said all large oil sands facilities have emergency crews and plans for forest fires. She noted that only about 20 percent of the region's oil sands can be mined from the surface. She said the sands can burn under certain circumstances but at a slow rate compared with surface structures.

Robin Smith with the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes the city, said it was believed everyone was out of the city.

Resident Breanna Schmidt said evacuating almost felt like "an apocalypse."

"We had to literally drive through smoke and fire, vehicles littered all over the sides of the road, and we had to drive as fast as we could and breathe as little as we could because the smoke was so intense and we could feel the heat from inside the vehicle," she said.

Former National Hockey League player Doug Sulliman said he could see from his apartment balcony that both sides of the highway were aflame, and he estimated hundreds of homes in Beacon Hill suburb over the hill were destroyed. "You could hear the pop, pop, pop because of the propane tanks. The fire was just consuming these houses. It just destroyed the whole community," he said.

He decided the best place to stay was the apartment, but he was forced out three hours later.

"I woke up just in time," he said in a phone interview. "Smoke had come into the apartment, but not bad. When I opened the door to the hallway, it was burning my eyes and when I went outside it was burning my throat."

The blaze had burned since Sunday and was under control until midafternoon Tuesday, after it overwhelmed firefighters when winds shifted quickly.

Stewart, the provincial spokesman, said the exact cause of the fire has not been determined. But she added that the winter and spring had been unusually dry and warm, parching the forests that surround the city. The weather this week saw temperatures reach about 90 degrees -- rare in Fort McMurray even at the peak of summer.

Information for this article was contributed by Rob Gillies and staff members of The Associated Press and by Ian Austen and Henry Fountain of The New York Times.

A Section on 05/05/2016

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