Convoys traveling through fire-hit city

Evacuees heading south to safer areas

Police man a roadblock as smoke from a wildfire billows Friday in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Police man a roadblock as smoke from a wildfire billows Friday in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta -- A convoy was underway Friday to move evacuees stranded at oil camps north of wildfire-ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, through the community to safe areas south of the Canadian oil sands capital.

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AP/The Canadian Press

Smoke rises Friday from a wildfire about 18 miles south of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Convoys on Friday were moving some of the city’s 80,000 evacuees back through the fi re-ravaged area, on the way to safer areas in the south. The fire, already nearly 250,000 acres in size, had the potential to double by today, an official said.

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AP/The Canadian Press

An RCMP officer surveys the damage on a street in fire-ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, in this Thursday photo provided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Alberta. More than 80,000 people have left Fort McMurray, in the heart of Canada’s oil sands as a wildfire that has devastated the area exploded in size.

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AP/The Canadian Press

Evacuees from the Fort McMurray wildfires wait to file insurance claims Friday at a shelter in Lac la Biche, Alberta. More than 80,000 people have left Fort McMurray in the heart of Canada’ oil sands, where the fire has torched 1,600 homes and other buildings.

As police and the military oversaw the procession of at least 500 vehicles, airlifts of evacuees resumed. A day after 8,000 people were flown out, 5,500 more were expected to be flown out Friday and another 4,000 today.

More than 80,000 people have left Fort McMurray, where the fire has torched 1,600 homes and other buildings. The evacuation has halted as much as a quarter of Canada's oil output, according to estimates.

The Alberta provincial government, which declared a state of emergency, said Friday that the size of the fire had grown to almost 250,000 acres. But Chad Morrison, Alberta's manager of wildfire prevention, said Friday that "there is a high potential that the fire could double in size by the end of tomorrow."

No deaths or injuries related to the fire have been reported.

The government said 1,100 firefighters, 110 helicopters, 295 pieces of heavy equipment and more than 27 air tankers were fighting the fire.

"This fire will continue to burn for a very long time until we see some significant rain," Morrison said.

Canadian meteorologists forecast a 40 percent chance of showers in the area on Sunday.

About 25,000 evacuees moved north in the hours after Tuesday's mandatory evacuation, where oil sands work camps were used to house evacuees. But most of the more than 80,000 evacuees fled south to Edmonton and elsewhere, and officials are moving everyone south where it is safer and they can get better support services.

The Alberta government is providing cash to the evacuees to help them with their immediate needs. Premier Rachel Notley said her Cabinet has approved a payment of $967 per adult and $387 per dependent at a cost to the province of $77 million. She told a briefing in Edmonton that she wants people who were forced from their homes to know that the government "has their back."

Police are escorting 50 vehicles at a time, south through the city on Alberta 63 for about 12.4 miles and then releasing the convoy. At that point another convoy of 50 cars will begin.

All intersections along the convoy route have been blocked off, and evacuees are not being allowed back to check on their homes in Fort McMurray. The city is surrounded by wilderness, and there are essentially only two ways out by road.

Crystal Mercredi packed her two kids and got out of town Tuesday, and even though her husband was just 20 minutes behind packing a trailer, he didn't get out until hours later because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

"I was worried that we were going to lose him," she said in a telephone interview. "He knew that I was upset so he jumped the curb on the wrong side of the road and got out."

Mercredi evacuated north but then moved south overnight and headed to Lac La Biche, Alberta, about 109 miles south, where her family has a lake house that housed 50 people the first night of the mandatory evacuation.

Lac La Biche, a town of 2,500, is helping about 12,000 evacuees with places to sleep, food, donated clothes and even shelter for their pets.

Mercredi said she was lucky that a Shell employee filled their tank after they initially evacuated north. That allowed them to escape south to Lac La Biche. She believes her Fort McMurray home is still intact but said her best friend lost hers based on video they saw. She said she and her family have had trouble sleeping and have had nightmares involving fires.

Scott Burrell, 42, from Kelowna, British Columbia, said he was working for a scaffolding company at a plant called Fort Hills when the fire broke out Tuesday.

"We were working overtime, and I just saw what looked like a massive cloud in the sky, but I knew it was fire," he said. "The very next day was my day to go home. Ends up we weren't going home that day."

Fanned by high winds, scorching heat and low humidity, the fire grew from 29 square miles Tuesday to 39 square miles on Wednesday, but by Thursday it was more than eight times that -- at 330 square miles. That's an area roughly the size of Calgary, Alberta's largest city. The fire is so large that smoke from the fair is blanketing parts of the neighboring province of Saskatchewan where Canada's environmental agency has issued special air-quality statements for several areas.

Unseasonably high temperatures combined with dry conditions have transformed the forest in much of Alberta into a tinderbox. Morrison, the wildfire-prevention manager, said the cause of the fire hasn't been determined, but he said it started in a remote forest and could have been ignited by lightning.

"They are dealing with a beast of a fire, one of the worst we've ever seen," Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said.

Goodale said firefighters and water bombers from other Canadian provinces are arriving, and if more is required the government will ask the United States for help.

The federal government is providing air transportation and 7,000 cots for evacuees in emergency shelters, with 13,000 more on the way.

Information for this article was contributed by Rob Gillies of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/07/2016

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