Fort McMurray, or Fort Make Money as some Canadians nicknamed it during its recent boom years, was the kind of place where second chances and fat paycheques beckoned. Those who settled there were trained engineers, refugees from war-torn countries and strivers from across Canada and beyond, drawn to a dot on the map in northern Alberta, a city carved out of boreal forest in a region gushing with oil riches.
Even after the price of crude began to collapse in late 2014, erasing thousands of jobs, many residents managed to hang on, tightening their belts while waiting for the good times to return. Then, early last week, smoke and ash filled the sky, the first harbingers of a catastrophic wildfire sweeping toward the city.
The entire population of about 88,000 was forced to evacuate, most in a frantic rush. Since then, the blaze has consumed whole swathes of Fort McMurray, ranking it as one of the most devastating fires in Canada’s history. The fast-moving flames turned many of its homes – and the baby photos and wedding albums and other treasures that few had the time to pack – into little more than charcoal.
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But even as displaced residents file insurance claims and pick through piles of donated clothing, many are adamant about rebuilding the city that gave them a financial lifeline as rare as the source of its prosperity, the largest oil sands reserve in the world.
“This is the only place you can go, sink 10 years of your life and bank enough money to retire,” said Kevin Lewis (55), the owner of a transportation company, said of Fort McMurray. He fled here to an evacuation centre in Lac La Biche, 220km south, in his pickup with only his wallet and the clothes on his back.
For the moment, cooler temperatures have allowed firefighters to gain some control over the blaze, which has turned away from the city. But it is still raging in a nearby forest, and the danger of its returning to the city remains.
Rise and fall
Until environmentalists challenged the Keystone XL pipeline earlier this decade, the city and the Alberta oil sands reserve were little known outside of Canada and the world’s oil companies. But attempts to convert its deposits of tarlike bitumen into fuel go back decades, and Fort McMurray’s fortunes have risen and fallen with them.
Its first modern boom was in the 1970s, when the government decided to place its bets on the costly-to-produce oil sands and billions of dollars flowed into the area. That ended with a thud as oil prices sank in the 1980s, and the sands suddenly seemed like a dying curiosity.
The latest, and much bigger, boom was unleashed in the last 15 years as oil prices soared, along with China’s demand for crude, and as technology to extract oil from the sands improved. Fort McMurray, which got its start as a fur trading post in the 1800s, was never as pretty as the forest that surrounded it; the downtown, which has escaped the wildfire so far, is an architectural time capsule of the 1970s, filled with low-rise buildings thrown up in a hurry. And even at its best, the city has a kind-of “town and gown” feel, with most of the jobs with big oil companies becoming what locals called “fly in, fly out”.
Those employees came from across Canada and were immediately bussed by their employers to camps closer to the remote oil sands projects, where they worked two-week shifts before returning home. Still, with so many jobs to be had in welding and construction and transportation, the population ballooned to more than 90,000 people at its peak from 38,000 in 2000. Land that cost 27,000 Canadian dollars an acre at the turn of the millennium had reached CA$1 million, while new housing developments ate ever deeper into the surrounding woods of black spruce.
"Doctors and lawyers don't make the money we make," said Chad Abbott (50), a scaffolding company supervisor, who moved to Fort McMurray in 1998 with his family and worked at an oil sands plant site, earning about CA$250,000 a year. He was part of a tight-knit community in the city composed largely of oil services employees, trades workers and engineers, many of whom have lost all they own.
Resentment
Initially, at the beginning of the most recent boom, Fort McMurray had welcomed keeping much of the fast-growing workforce in the remote work camps. But those workers’ lack of connection to Fort McMurray – as well as the lack of their dollars being spent there – eventually stirred resentment.
“In the early days, they didn’t want the camp workers in town because they would bring with them all you would imagine in the Wild West: Come into town, shoot up the town and head back out,” said Stephen Ross, the president of Devonian Properties, which began buying local land in 2000.
The city could not hold all of the seediness at bay; for a time a raft of strip clubs did good business. But over the years, Fort McMurray smoothed its rougher edges. Its neighbourhoods filled with a melange of accents and nationalities, from Newfoundlanders to Filipinos employed at hotels and gas stations and heavy-equipment movers from Fiji.
Before the fire, the number of strip clubs had dwindled to just one, Showgirls, near the end of the town’s main drag, Franklin Avenue. Several blocks away, the green-domed Markaz ul Islam mosque had grown too small for Friday prayers, forcing the overflow crowds to use the gymnasium of a nearby Catholic school.
Samya Hassan (51), a hijab-wearing refugee from Yemen, came to Canada in 1990 and settled in Fort McMurray four years ago with her family. They prospered. Her husband got a job as a truck driver, she as a cashier – enough to put their three children through school.
That all ended last Tuesday when she and her family fled. Fire roared next to the highway as they crept along in bumper-to-bumper traffic; she used her headscarf to breathe through the heavy black smoke that blotted out the sun. Hassan was able to grab her passport, but no family photos. “I’ll have to start life over again like 25 years ago,” she said.
For countless displaced residents, it is the lost things money cannot replace that will haunt them. Ariana Caissie (22) took her two cats, but said her late father’s recipe cards were lost when her mother had no time to save them. “They’re just memories now,” she said.
Residents, including local politicians, are committed to rebuilding, but questions remain about what Fort McMurray will be. “Depending on what we’re able to dream up – and actually do and deliver – it’s a whole new world,” said Melissa Blake, the mayor.
New York Times
