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Alberta Declares State Of Emergency As Thousands Flee Massive Wildfire

A helicopter carries fire retardant to a wildfire burning in a Fort McMurray neighborhood on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. CREDIT: FLICKR USER PREMIEROFALBERTA/CHRIS SCHWARZ/GOVERNMENT OF ALBERTA
A helicopter carries fire retardant to a wildfire burning in a Fort McMurray neighborhood on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. CREDIT: FLICKR USER PREMIEROFALBERTA/CHRIS SCHWARZ/GOVERNMENT OF ALBERTA

The Canadian province of Alberta declared a state of emergency Wednesday as 88,000 people in the city of Fort McMurray were forced to flee a fast-moving, immense wildfire. The blaze has already destroyed 1,600 buildings, including a school.

The entire city could be scorched in what could end up being Canada’s costliest natural disaster. Already 1,110 firefighters and 145 helicopters are on the scene.

Thick smoke made the evacuation routes — two roads out of town to the north and south — seem like night-time in the middle of the day.

In a press conference Thursday morning, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said the region was still experiencing extreme fire conditions, with 18 new fires starting Wednesday, bringing the total to 49 wildfires. Seven of those were out of control, she said. Containing them would be more challenging due to high winds. She did not have an update on structure fires in Fort McMurray because firefighters could not get into the city, according to Edmonton Journal politics reporter Emma Graney.

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Many residents of Anzac, a hamlet southeast of Fort McMurray, helped shelter residents of the city but became evacuees themselves Wednesday night as the fire grew.

“You could hear the pop, pop, pop because of the propane tanks,” Doug Sulliman, a local resident, told the Associated Press. “The fire was just consuming these houses. It just destroyed the whole community.”

This satellite photo from two days ago shows how large the burn scar was on Tuesday. It spread around and into the city on Wednesday and Thursday.

The fire roared into its current size thanks to hot, windy conditions that could get even worse into weekend.

Fort McMurray hit 89°F on Wednesday, and in fact, the region as a whole is baking: six cities in the neighboring province of Saskatchewan topped 90°F, amounting to at least 42 daily temperature record highs.

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“Today has been a devastating day. We have had explosive fire conditions on the landscape brought on by extremely high temperatures” and low relative humidity, Bernie Schmitte, wildfire manager at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, said Tuesday night during a news conference, according to the Edmonton Journal.

Last winter was drier than normal in part because of El Niño, which brought hot temperatures that easily melted the snowpack. This left plenty of dry fuel for a wildfire to consume.

A warming planet makes these megablazes more likely and more dangerous across the globe. Wildfires tore up millions of acres in Alaska last year — a record-breaking fire season. The year before was a historic wildfire season in Canada’s Northwest Territories and British Columbia. This is a new era for wildfires this far north, thanks to climate change causing temperatures to rise and snowpack to disappear.

The smoke from the fire triggered air quality alerts. This is unfortunately not a new problem for local residents surrounded by oil development operations, who have seen declining air quality levels in recent years, according to government data.

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Boreal forests store a large portion of the world’s carbon, and when they burn up, that carbon goes straight into the atmosphere.

Alberta is home to Canada’s tar sands oil region, the third-largest oil deposit in the world. Producers have been forced to cut output because of the fire, though at the moment petroleum facilities are not in the fire’s path. Some companies have shut down pipelines to help evacuate personnel.

Tar sands oil is controversial because the thick, gooey crude is mixed with sand and bitumen, which requires unconventional extraction techniques — such as pumping superheated steam into the ground. This increases the carbon pollution the fuel causes beyond that of other fossil fuels.

It also tears up the landscape enough to cause observers to liken it to the apocalypse or Mordor’s Mouth Doom.

Tar sands oil is notoriously leaky, with a leak at Cold Lake bubbling over 12,000 barrels of oil to the surface. As of last year, the leak, which began in 2013, is still ongoing. In 2013, scientists also found a 7,300-mile ring of mercury pollution around the region’s tar sands operations.

A spokesperson from the Pembina Institute told ThinkProgress, “like everyone else, we’re concerned about the possible economic, environmental and health impacts” of the fire. However, Pembina doe not want to speculate on its impact on oilsands infrastructure and pollution at this time.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government would match all donations to the Canadian Red Cross supporting Fort McMurray.

He also encouraged people to separate the pattern of climate change over time from the effects of one event.

“It’s well known that one of the consequences of climate change will be a greater prevalence of extreme weather events around the planet,” Trudeau said at a Wednesday news conference in Ottawa.

“However any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there’s a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome.”

“There have always been fires. There have always been floods,” Trudeau continued. “Pointing at any one incident and saying, ‘well, this is because of that,’ is neither helpful nor entirely accurate. We need to separate a pattern over time from any one event.”