Major Forest Fire Wiping Out Fort McMurray, Alberta
A large forest fire is raging out of control in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. The entire town's population (Of around 60,000 or so) has been evacuated but the entire town and the forest around the area. Here are several pictures documenting what it looks like and the scale of it:
From the highway evacuation route.
From the sky.
From inside the inferno's evacuation routes, the suburbs, and other parts of the city.
This is extremely hard for the residents of Fort McMurray as they're currently in an economic recession and now an uncontrollable fire is destroying their properties, possessions, and businesses. I hope that everyone is okay from this event.
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I live a couple hours south of Fort Mac. It's pretty crazy. Lots of displaced families around here. The fire just keeps growing. They've announced a state or emergency, requesting help from surrounding provinces. Something like 1800 buildings have been destroyed in 24hrs.
Poor people I cant even begin to imagine what they're going through. Their lives wont ever be the same
Are there places being set up for the displaced families to help them?
Ironically these shots look quite artistic and I doubt it was their intention.
It's clear failure to spot the fire early on or at least act upon it before it got out of control.
Not that the coverage of terrain is that good in the most places.
Yes. Our major sports arena has even opened for them.
It wasn't a failure. Canada has a LOT of forest and wildfires happen quite frequently. They had warnings, but warnings happen often. Just all of a sudden winds shifted and the fire headed right for the town. The evacuation order was given about 10hrs before the fire entered the city. No one has blamed anybody. It just happened. Massive wildfires are a part of our country.
I'm glad that there is action being taken to help the people bear this extremely heavy burden.
Destruction always has a type of beauty around it.
Okay, I could then say their preparations in such area is "inadequate."
I know that forest fires can get out of control rather easily even if prepared, and it would be insanely expensive to be "completely" prepared. But still come on, aren't those areas pretty famous of having out of control fires?
Well, if prevention of fires etc is not something that can be easily done, maybe they could design such towns so that they have hard time to catch the forest fire? Although that would probably look ridiculous to have large area around towns as "safe zone" or something like that.
That, I can't comment on. FM is an industrial town, not a place you really go for vacation. I haven't actually been there in 10+ years. I don't remember how it's laid out.
This story reminds me a lot of a town called Marysville hear in Victoria. It's surrounded by forest, so a lot of residents weren't able to evacuate during the Black Saturday bushfires. Apparently the place was gutted during the fires. At least in this case people were able to evacuate.
These photos look almost beautiful in a tragic sorta way...
I couldn't imagine dealing with this, hopefully those displaced families will receive the help they'll need and get that fire under control soon,
Most recent news from the past 6hrs.
here
There's no way it was intentional, but the big quote on the bag in this screencap really got me.
https://imgur.com/a/0BrWf
Very sad. I'm curious on what caused the fire.
Most likely, it was human caused. Probably a campfire not fully put out or a cigarette butt thrown away or something.
Wildfires are fairly common. According to the above article, there are about 600 human caused wildfires every year in Alberta, with another 600 caused by natural stuff like lightning. Its usually not a problem. There are a couple of weeks after winter where everything's dry and hot, but not enough vegetation to stop the fire. Then there was a strong wind blowing right into town. Perfect storm, really.
Hopefully they can block it off or contain it