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And where two raging fires meet together,
they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.
—William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene 1
Ever since Syncrude’s bitumen upgrading plant came on line in 1978, it had never shut down—not once. Huge, complicated, expensive, and temperamental, it made more sense, and more money, to keep the sprawling complex running. Suncor’s operations were even bigger, and Cenovus, Canadian Natural, Husky/BP, and Imperial/Esso were also huge, but the threat posed by the Fort McMurray Fire was bigger still. Starting on May 5, as the fire continued to trend north and east, mines, upgraders, and SAG-D operations began scaling back or shutting down altogether. Rolling smoke from the fire was choking workers and reducing visibility to mere yards, making conditions even more hazardous. A few miles north of the city, the fire was encroaching on Suncor’s tailings ponds along with the roads and infrastructure that serviced them. Because of the fire’s rapid growth and the heavy smoke, Syncrude shut down its Aurora mine, and its Mildred Lake plant. Suncor shut down its operations on Tar Island, and other companies followed.
In Canada, May 7 is National Wildfire Community Preparedness Day, and, in 2016, it fell on a Saturday. By then, a week into the fire, China’s Nexen Long Lake facility, which the REOC had abandoned three days earlier, was completely surrounded by burned or burning forest. There, south of the city, the fire was also threatening U.S.-bound pipelines. This, combined with the site closures, cut the industry’s daily production of dilbit, synthetic crude, and diesel by more than a million barrels a day—nearly half of their normal output. In monetary terms, this translated to about $60 million in losses every twenty-four hours. These vast plants, some of which cover square miles of land, are always occupied, day or night, winter or summer, and they are always busy. “It’s super loud,” explained Aron Harris, a member of Suncor’s fire department. “Banging noises, flame, steam—you name it. It’s just obnoxious.”
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. By May 7, all the plants within a half hour of Fort McMurray were empty and shrouded in blinding smoke. With their thousands of workers evacuated, hundreds of trucks and bulldozers were idled while cranes and power shovels stood motionless on the horizon. The vessels this mechanical army served—insatiable crushers and rocket-sized boilers, hydrotreater reactors and vacuum towers—were all shut down.
“It was off,” said Harris. “It was completely off.”
Harris was part of a crew of twelve left in charge of Suncor’s enormous Tar Island base plant, a site so big it has its own cloverleaf highway interchange, and its own bridge across the Athabasca River. Its tank farm alone is a half mile square. Harris spent his shifts with three of his mates in an ARFF truck, patrolling the sprawling facility, looking for spot fires in the smoke. “It was eerie,” he told me. “The flare stacks were turned off. You’re so used to loud noises down there, I said to Nick, ‘You hear that?’ He’s like, ‘Exactly. It’s so quiet.’ ” Harris and his comrades were experiencing something most people only see in dystopian films: the world after humans, when the engines of civilization have stopped running. Like their municipal counterparts downtown, and Paul Ayearst with his son up in Beacon Hill, Harris and his crew were the only ones left. Most striking, perhaps, was how quickly the transition began. “You’d see deer down there,” Harris said. “You could see coyotes.”
It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which wild animals would willingly roam a bitumen plant, a truly toxic place reeking of men and petrochemistry, ablaze with fire and floodlights, and thunderously loud. Maybe these creatures sensed the void and were curious; maybe they were disoriented by the smoke; more likely, they were refugees, too, and Tar Island was one of the few places left that wasn’t actively on fire. “Weird is the only way I can describe it,” said Harris. “But I guess at this point, what’s weird? Nothing was out of the ordinary anymore. Something caught fire? Well, of course, that’s what it’s supposed to do now.”
On Sunday, May 8, strong winds from the west caused a significant eastward run of the wildfire and created a long and dangerous flank directly south of the oil sands operations. By midday on the 9th, when journalists and the premier were allowed their first limited access under escort, the wildfire had ballooned yet again to nearly half a million acres. The Fort McMurray Fire was barely a week old and it had already entered the record books: 90,000 people evacuated; 2,500 structures destroyed and another 500 damaged; nearly a thousand square miles of forest burned; an internationally significant mining and pipeline operation severely curtailed; overland transportation crippled; hundreds of firefighters and dozens of aircraft engaged with no end in sight. It was an unprecedented scenario, in both the annals of modern urban fire and peacetime resource extraction.
On May 9, Chief Darby Allen addressed the public on TV from Fire Hall 5. Standing behind him was Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Allen said. “I spoke to my colleagues from Forestry, and many of the fire conditions, and the way the fire behaved—no one’s ever seen anything like this. This is rewriting the book—the way this thing happened, the way it traveled, the way it behaved. So, they’re rewriting their formulas on how fires behave based on this fire.”
Strictly speaking, this was not true. The formulas did not need rewriting—not if you were familiar with the Chisholm or Slave Lake fires; not if you had seen NOAA’s Seasonal Fire Assessment, or Alberta Forestry’s fire weather index, and not if you had studied how recent wildfires behaved under similarly explosive conditions in places like California and southern Australia. Twenty-first-century fire weather conditions have the same effect on landscapes all over the world. On that first summerlike weekend in May, an accurate and timely forecast had been made: a high pressure system in drought conditions accompanied by record-setting temperatures and rock-bottom humidity with a rising wind veering toward a thickly settled area in convoluted terrain. This combination equates to firestorm potential anywhere from Melbourne to Fairbanks. Whether it’s eucalyptus in Australia, chaparral in California, or black spruce in the boreal, they play the same role in fueling wildfires, and the wind plays the same role in casting embers. Like us, fire is an omnivorous and adaptable consumer.
What was distinctive in 2016 was not even so much the scale (the Richardson Fire of 2011 was huge, and caused a half-billion dollars in damage to the bitumen industry), it was how people perceived it and responded to it. In other words, it was the Lucretius Problem: “I’ve never seen anything like this.” It resembles the hubris that also seems to go hand in hand with large capital investments and petroleum, and it takes many forms. In 2015, ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance told Bloomberg that it would be another fifty years before electric cars had a measurable impact on oil demand; five years later, few in the oil industry would make that claim. (As of 2023, Lance was still CEO.)
On Wednesday, May 11, by which time the fire had been burning in the city for eight days, Darby Allen went on live TV again. “We think we got this thing beat in McMurray,” he said. The days continued hot and dry, the fire burning unabated in all directions around the city as it ebbed and flowed with the wind and sun. There was no rain in the forecast. Smoke from the fire was now visible on the Atlantic coast, more than 2,500 miles away. Reinforcements had been mobilizing from all over Canada, and by Monday, May 16, more than a thousand firefighters and firefighting personnel, along with 130 pieces of heavy equipment, scores of helicopters, and a dozen air tankers, were assigned to Fort McMurray, with more on the way. It was hard to imagine how fire weather conditions could get any worse than they were already, but they did.
On the 16th, the fire weather index hit an astonishing 42, handily surpassing the record-breaking conditions of May 3. In town, as efforts were being made to restore gas and electricity service, more houses ignited, for a variety of reasons. A suspected gas leak in a home in Dickinsfield caused an entire house to detonate with such force that it left a crater, drove two-by-fours through the walls of half a dozen neighboring homes, and blew out the windows in many more. Meanwhile, in the forest, the fire raged on, pushing ever closer to the mines, plants, and man camps. South of town, all available resources were rallied to defend Enbridge’s Cheecham Terminal, a 2-million-barrel tank farm used to feed southbound pipelines, now in grave danger of being overrun and exploding.
The following day, May 17, Aron Harris was on patrol at Suncor when he saw a burst of flame on the horizon a few miles to the west of Tar Island. It was the Blacksands Executive Lodge; all 665 units of the deluxe new camp burned to the ground in less than thirty minutes. No one even tried to stop it. Several nearby camps with housing for more than two thousand people had fire burning right up to the fences. They were saved only by a fleet of ARFFs, pumpers, and water trucks forming a curtain of water around the burning perimeter. That same day, eight thousand occupants of these and other nearby camps had to be evacuated (again), not simply because of fire risk, but because of the smoke. Under normal conditions, the province of Alberta uses a 1–10 scale to rate air quality, 10 being the worst. That day, the air quality around Fort McMurray was 38. Without a clock, it was hard to tell what time of day or night it was. By then, smoke from this and other fires had cast a pall across the entire continent—south to the Gulf Coast of Texas, east as far as the Bahamas, and northward all the way to Labrador.
Blanketed in acrid smoke and stiflingly hot, the city and the surrounding forest went into a kind of crepuscular dormancy. Fire crews continued to search for hot spots and fight fire, a task they would be performing well into the fall. Police patrolled for looters, but mostly they found solitude and desolation. With the exception of the rec center, which was now being used as a staging area for firefighting operations, the electricity and gas were still off across much of the city, and its residents were still gone. With the sole exception of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, no modern North American city had been disinhabited for so long.
While deer and coyotes made tentative forays into the silenced bitumen plants, other creatures were exploring these new voids as well. In the city’s twenty-five thousand or so surviving homes, apartments, restaurants, and grocery stores, a regime change was under way. It began, most often, in the kitchen. After a week or two in the unseasonal heat, perishables began to ripen and then to rot. Alberta is beef country, but hunting and fishing are popular here as well, and the abundance of meat, combined with high wages and a big-box mentality, meant that, in addition to refrigerators, meat freezers were common items in garages and basements. As the temperature rose, and all that meat decomposed, gases were generated, pressure built, and seals failed. By mid-May, many of the city’s fridges and freezers stood in pools of clotting blood. Inside, the contents took on lives of their own. Dairy products that weren’t cheese already were well on their way, and any leftover meals from May 3 were unrecognizable. Even through the heavy smoke, the rank and wayward odor of putrefying flesh was compelling, and flies caught wind of it. With the flies came maggots, which begat more flies. Warm and contained, with unlimited food and nothing to disturb them, breeding conditions were ideal. Outside, patrolling police, firefighters, and gas and electricity technicians saw nothing out of the ordinary as they made their rounds, but inside, any building with food in it was being colonized and transformed.
Insurance adjusters were some of the first to enter these putrid, teeming habitats, and one compared some of the sights he encountered to “CSI murder scenes.” By then, many generations of flies had hatched, multiplied, and died; the growth was exponential. Another local adjuster opened a utility door in a client’s house only to find the interior seething with mice. In the malls around town, the supermarkets had transformed into Olympic-sized petri dishes; floors and shelves were carpeted with dead flies while the cavernous spaces above buzzed and swirled with the living. Left to their own devices, the lobsters in the live tank at Save-On-Foods had turned on each other, but the rats never had it so good. Where there weren’t vermin, there was rampant mold in a rainbow of colors. One adjuster marveled at the bread aisle, where every bag had blossomed into a psychedelic terrarium—save for one brand. After three weeks, the Wonder Bread looked as fresh as it had on May 3. Meanwhile, even in the tidiest homes, mold—from decaying food, water leaks, and neglect—proliferated along with its attendant odors, which were further intensified by the penetrating stink of burned trees, cars, and houses that permeated everything. All told, about twenty thousand refrigerators and freezers were declared biohazards and had to be thrown away. Strapped shut and wheeled to the curb, they still stank, and this drew bears in from the surrounding woods. Nature would not be denied.
And neither would Wayne McGrath. Following his evacuation from Abasand on May 3, McGrath, the Suncor welder who fought the fire and lost, didn’t go far. Unable to abandon his Harley Road Glide, he shuttled from one small community to the next in his pickup—staying with friends in Gregoire Lake, camping in Lac Labiche and then Wandering River. Like this, he hovered for a week, until he got word from a friend that his strategy had worked: because he had moved them out into the open at the last minute, both the Harley and the Cutlass had survived the fire. On May 10, he made his move: “I snuck back into town with a whole fleet of bulldozers,” he told me. “There was red trucks—red mechanics’ trucks—so, I got in between them, got waved through.”
When he arrived in the city, McGrath was shocked by what he saw. “It was like Vietnam in there—fucking helicopters going everywhere. The fire was still going, right? Found my Harley downtown. Friend of mine put it on a float truck [along with his Cutlass sedan]. That was a good favor. There were cops fuckin’ everywhere. Two cops came over and I said, ‘Yeah, these are mine and what I’m going to do is take them.’ Cop said, ‘You can’t leave with them.’ ‘What do you mean? They’re mine.’ ‘Yeah, well, this is called a disaster area now. It’s the property of the city.’
“I got more or less told I had to go because I didn’t have an armband. What I did is, I made one out of tape, but the new ones were painted orange so I had to hustle back to Wandering River, which is two and a half hours away, and find an orange marker. There’s a guy with me—he stayed down low in the seat and I just went like that with the armband and I got in again. I got to my Cutlass, said, ‘If this car starts, bud, I’m gone.’ He said, ‘Well, I guess I might as well get out, too.’ Cutlass started; buddy took the truck. The Cutlass ran out of gas [about nineteen miles] outside town. I had to leave it, flag my buddy down who was coming behind me. Back to Wandering River. Had to go find gas cans, gas up, come back up, get the car. Had to go back for the bike. My Harley means a lot to me, right? Went back for the bike.”
It is unlikely that any other unauthorized person came and went from Fort McMurray as many times as McGrath did (only three of numerous clandestine trips are described here). “I’m pretty cagey,” he said. “Even my previous ex is like, ‘I knew you’d go back for your bike. I knew you weren’t leaving without it.’
“But the keys burned, right? The fobs. So, I called in a lot of favors over a few days. Ended up bumming a trailer in Wandering River, but I had nobody to come up and give me a hand. So, I met this guy in Wandering River who’s hanging out at the gas station—French guy, alcoholic. I bought beer, didn’t give a rat’s ass. Got talking to him, told him what I was up to and said, ‘You want to give me a hand?’ Turns out he used to rob banks in Montreal when he was a kid. Gave me the whole story. He was eighteen, used to rob banks.
“Got up to town, pulled up right to my motorcycle with the trailer. Cops everywhere. I said to him, ‘Don’t look at anybody, just put the bike on the trailer, strap it down, and that’s all there is to it.’ So we’re putting it on and strapping it down. I was just getting in the truck and this cop comes walking over. I had beer in the truck everywhere. Cop says, ‘What year’s your bike?’ I started crying.”
We are in a crowded bar and McGrath is choking up at the memory of this moment that was, for him, a fulcrum leveraging everything that followed. “Cop said, ‘I knew it was your bike. I knew it was your bike a couple days ago when you were here, but I was working with another officer and they were here from all over Canada.’ ”
Mercy comes in many forms, and McGrath knew then that he was safe. “He couldn’t say, ‘Yeah, take it,’ because he’d been with this other cop. I said to him, ‘Here, I’ll show you the registration.’ He said, ‘No, bud, I don’t need to see it. I know it’s your bike.’ I cried, man. He was a biker cop—rolled up his sleeve: full of tattoos. He was from just outside Calgary—wherever they had that big flood. He lost everything, too.”[*]
After replacing his burned key fobs, McGrath rode his Harley to Newfoundland, a road and ferry journey of four thousand miles.
By the time the fire was three weeks old, it had burned over a million acres of forest, more than two thousand square miles. Still out of control and growing by the day, the fire had spread eastward into the neighboring province of Saskatchewan. With active fire now largely out of the city proper, and the smoke hazard somewhat less severe, technicians set about restoring gas and electricity to Fort McMurray’s unburned neighborhoods. In an effort to keep down the prodigious amounts of ash and toxic dust, a pale gray shroud of adhesive “tackifier” was sprayed over the ruins.
Carol Christian, a writer and mother of a grown son, came up to Fort McMurray in 2007, intending to stay for six months. She took to the place and built a life that included writing for the local paper, Fort McMurray Today, and working the desk for a local politician. On May 3, Christian, like so many of her neighbors, only knew to evacuate when a friend called her. She rushed out of her Abasand townhouse with the barest of necessities, confident she would be returning in a day or two. As days stretched into weeks, Christian couch-surfed with family and friends, unsure when she would be allowed home again. The city was closed for a month. When residents were finally allowed back in early June, it was to a ghost town. Formerly vibrant, landscaped neighborhoods were now unrecognizable to the people who had once called them home. “The first time we were allowed up to Abasand,” Christian recalled, “you still got that little bit of hope that maybe, just maybe. But no.” She had seen the footage on the news, but she still wasn’t prepared for the vision that greeted her. “That’s a sight to behold,” she said, “when you see your bathtub is in your furnace.”
Christian’s townhouse complex had been five stories tall. When she returned in June, there was nothing left but ash, bathtubs, and the shells of heavy appliances heaped together in the underground parking garage, which was now open to sky. “The people who were back at that time—myself included—people were walking around like zombies,” said Christian. “They were shell-shocked.”
The aftermath of a major wildfire has its own palette, one that reflects fire’s omnivorous appetite by reducing urban, rural, and wild to a unified color scheme of total oxidation that ranges from bone white through taupe to charcoal gray and the glossiest raven black, the rest of the spectrum burned away. After one of these big fires, the only actual color left on the landscape is in the terragraphs of orange fire retardant, some of them hundreds of yards long, draped across the ridges and valleys like the Nazca Lines, or a work by Christo.
In town, at ground level, metal shower stalls are among the few things to survive. They stand alone in the ruins, a morbid joke now, while washer-dryer sets stare back like blank eyes in a roofless skull. The mottled frames of stove, air conditioner, freezer, and fridge are warped out of shape, or collapsed. In the driveways, and on the street, the scorched and hollow shells of cars look less like vehicles than like the exuviae of gigantic insects. Ash covers everything—the memories, the histories, smells, recipes, comforts, reduced now to the barest elements—carbon, stone, steel—all cloaked in smoke and suffused with the acrid reek of burning. Outside, for there is no longer an “inside,” families stand on the sidewalk wondering where their houses went.
Those whose homes have burned are struck by how much is gone, and also by what remains: a carpet preserved by leaking water from a ruptured water pipe; books, ghost white with every page intact, until you touch them and they collapse in a cloud of ash. Home is our memory palace, and there is an existential cruelty in the razing of it. To burn them down by the hundreds and thousands, as wildfires are doing now across the western U.S. and Canada, is a brutal affront to the order we live by, and to the communities and habitats that give our lives meaning. Their loss shocks the heart like a sudden death. Left behind are juxtapositions so bizarre and disorienting that to describe them sounds like the mutterings of an insane person: garbage can puddle; melted guns on a platter; cars bleeding aluminum; piles of tire wire. Is this really where I lived, where I raised my children? Where did their beds go? Their bedrooms? The photos, the evidence? In their place, a void, the shadow of a burned tree where the kitchen table used to be, pools of once-familiar things gone molten, settled now into new forms, rigid and unrecognizable.
Fort McMurray selects for stoicism; it has to, with that industry and those winters. Many who lost homes shed their tears, sucked it up, and said, “It’s just stuff.” But it’s more complicated. People were glad to be alive, but that didn’t lessen the material bereavement of losing everything they owned, everything they had labored in those mines and plants for, year in and year out. As part of the reentry and recovery process, church groups like Samaritan’s Purse offered to help sort through the ruins on the off chance something might have survived. Wearing protective gear, volunteers climbed into the basements of burned homes with shovels, rakes, and sieves. While the owners looked on, suggesting where to look, they sifted through the ashes. This is a level of compassion and care that few disaster survivors get, and it says a lot about the community and faith of Fort McMurray. Despite these generous efforts, however, very little was recovered; the fire’s heat was simply too intense.
“Ashification” is another one of those words, like “spalling,” that doesn’t enter the conversation below 1,000°F or so, but that, in a word, is what happened. Many residents were perplexed by how a large, sturdy structure that had once housed them, their families, their cars, and all their possessions could be reduced to a pile of ash and scrap metal that would fit in the back of a pickup. Even forensic fire investigators were puzzled by the absence of normally fireproof objects like toilets and sinks. They weren’t there, because they had vaporized.
Carol Christian had the sifting done at her place in Abasand. “I wanted to find something,” she said. “I found a colander and some barbecue utensils. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll clean that up and I’ll make a mobile’—kind of a symbol that you can still go forward. But when you stand there and think, ‘This used to be my house…’ ”
During those first days back, Christian went up to Abasand several times, in effect to confirm that this unthinkable calamity had actually occurred. “I was surprised I didn’t see more people up there,” she said, “but why would they come? There was nothing.” And so, as one often does when visiting the grave of a loved one, she found herself alone. “It’s like you’re the last person alive on Earth,” she told me. “I was waiting for bears—kept looking behind me just to make sure. It was weird. It was just—so—weird. When you knew what was there, what had been there, and that’s what you kept picturing, but it’s not.”
Christian was describing a phantom feeling similar to what some amputees experience after losing a limb. “I’m thinking how many people here are in the same boat,” she said. “They’ve emigrated from somewhere, brought their life with them, and now it’s gone.” Christian spoke with some authority on this subject: her family is from the Isle of Man, and this was the second home she’d lost to fire. “Your home,” she wanted me to understand, “isn’t just a building; it’s your identity, a reflection of who you are when you gather with your family. It’s your art gallery, museum, library—I lost a small fortune in books. Christmas is going be so hard because people are going to reach for things.”
Not everyone was as eloquent or measured. “I hate that fucking fire,” said a Newfoundlander named Pauline Vey. “It took everything.”
Those who owned no property and had grown up far from Canada told some very different stories. While standing in line at the Tim Hortons downtown, a Sri Lankan security guard described to me his experience of the fire, and it didn’t take long: “I grew up in a war zone,” he said flatly, “so it makes no difference to me.”
Carol Christian didn’t see him, but Wayne McGrath was up in Abasand, too. McGrath rode his Harley all the way back from Newfoundland, returning to Fort McMurray in early June. Once there, he went through a process similar to Christian’s—staring at the ruins, trying to assimilate an absence that was simply too big to take in. “I won’t deny—for three weeks I was drunk,” he told me. “A lot of people were. I hung out at my house for maybe ten days, drinking and crying and sitting and watching. Down on my hands and knees, I found a couple of things my dad gave me. Found a coin he got for serving with the mining company back in Labrador. Nobody seems to understand how much you lose. I have buddies that lost everything. They’re sometimes the only ones I can talk to. Since I lost the house, though, I just slowed down and I’m sad. I haven’t slept right since.”
McGrath had nowhere to go, so he went back to work. “Went back to regular shift and I told them, ‘Well, I don’t have a house.’ ‘Well, you can stay in the camp, Wayne—for $125 a day.’ ” McGrath had eighteen years in with the company, and he took umbrage. “That’s how much Suncor’s changed,” he said. “If this was five years ago, I could stay in that camp ’til my house was rebuilt, but now—new owners. I could lose my job for saying that.”
McGrath had lost more than his house in the fire; something else fundamental was missing, too—something between faith and trust. “My foreman come to me and said, ‘Wayne, you don’t want to be here, do you?’ Turning point for me was I had to go do this course one day, a driving course. I completely failed the exam. I didn’t give two fucks, just more or less got up and walked out of the room. Foreman said, ‘Wayne, what are you doing?’ ‘Just want to get out of here.’ Went to the doctor and told him what happened and he seen I was a mess. He gave me a thing. He said, ‘Take six weeks off, come back and see me.’ So I did—jumped on my bike, rode across Canada again.”
By late fall, McGrath had settled in a Suncor-owned rental in town, and things appeared to stabilize somewhat. A sympathetic agent was handling his insurance claim, and he was going to try to buy the lot next door so he could expand his workshop. For a while, this kept him going, but the claim and the rebuild progressed slowly. In the meantime, McGrath still found solace and escape in fast machines; he always pushed them hard, and, always, skill and luck had protected him. On December 15, 2018, he had plans to meet with his insurance agent, Sue McOrmand, for a progress report. “He texted me and said that he wanted to go sledding [snowmobiling],” McOrmand told me. “I just told him, ‘No rivers,’ as they didn’t seem solid yet. The last text I got was a sad face saying, ‘No rivers.’ I never heard anything after that.”
McGrath was reported missing two days later, and it took a helicopter to find him. He was spotted miles from town on a frozen river, which in winter are irresistible racetracks for many snowmobilers. He hadn’t gone through the ice; he had crashed. Because there was nowhere to land the helicopter, McGrath’s body couldn’t be retrieved until the following day. By then, his body had been out in the elements for three nights and had frozen as hard as the ice.
Hope was hard to come by in June 2016, but it was there, in the kindness and compassion many people were shown, and also in the lawns and gardens. Deep beneath the ash and tackifier, the growing impulse prevailed. “The grass was neon,” said one early returner. It was also knee-high. Tulips burst, phoenix-like, from the ashes to flaunt their vivid reds and yellows, as if to say, “We’re still here. Life goes on.”
That fall, Carol Christian, like just about everyone else, was still waiting for her insurance money to come through. Her townhouse was covered, but she was told the rebuild would take two years. In the meantime, she was sharing a two-bedroom rental with her newlywed son. It wasn’t ideal. “I had eight of those reusable shopping bags,” she told me, “and I was thinking, This is the sum of my existence right now. It’s so sad, but I still had more than some people. I have one friend—all she got was her husband’s ashes.”
In different ways, everyone in Fort McMurray was having to integrate this traumatic assault on their lives, to psychologically metabolize the damage it inflicted, to somehow reckon all those voids where trees, buildings, and other landmarks had once stood, and where memories and meaning had once been made. Many of those voids, it turned out, were human beings. Of the roughly ninety thousand people who left on May 3, twenty thousand—nearly a quarter of the working population—did not return. The only other North American city to see this level of disaster-related attrition is New Orleans after Katrina.
One of the cruelest aftershocks for homeowners was the realization that just because their house was gone didn’t mean the mortgage was. Likewise, many business owners who rented from remote landlords received no forgiveness on their rent for the time the city was closed down. Most people were insured, but the sheer magnitude of the event overwhelmed the system. Craig MacKay works for a local branch of ClaimsPro, and he summed it up this way: “On May second we had no claims; on May third we had fifty thousand claims.” It wasn’t just houses; it was cars, trucks, tools, firearms, and recreational vehicles. There was smoke damage, water damage, and residual heat damage. A lot of things melted: vinyl siding, rubber seals on doors and windows, outdoor wiring, toys, fences, garden furniture, and even the joints on water pipes. Whether it was due to fire, water, smoke, vermin, or mold, thousands of surviving houses were compromised in a myriad of ways, including shrapnel damage from the many things that exploded. Even months later, roofs and water pipes that had appeared unscathed began to leak, and electrical wiring shorted out for no discernible reason.
Because of the extraordinary volume of claims, insurance adjusters were flown into Fort McMurray from all over Canada and the U.S. It’s easy to lose perspective on a place when you’ve lived there a long time, and these outsiders, most of them first-time visitors, arrived with fresh eyes. Vonda Pikes flew in from Texas in mid-May; Fort McMurray had not been on her radar before she got the call, but she ended up spending most of the summer there, processing claims out of a portable building. Pikes was surprised by how remote the place was, and also by how people treated her. She was fairly sure that she was the first African American many of her new colleagues had ever met. “I was born in Louisiana, in the woods,” Pikes told me, “and I know some things about prejudice. All I worked with in Fort McMurray were white people. They didn’t seem prejudiced; they were curious about my culture, and they asked about my experiences with racism and police brutality—how did we deal with the prejudice, and things like that.”
It made an impression on Pikes because these were total strangers from another country who were under terrific stress from the thousands of claims they had to process, and yet they were curious about her life and concerned about her well-being. Pikes also met a number of people from the African diaspora, most of them in service and transportation jobs, and they worried about her, too. “Black people I met up there asked me, ‘How do you live in Texas? I’d never want to live in the States.’ ”
Some of the cultural differences were funny, and they revealed the extraordinary breadth of the British colonial legacy—from the Arctic coast of Canada to the Gulf Coast of the United States. Pikes and her clients were all native English speakers, but “the people from Newfoundland didn’t know what I was saying, and I didn’t know what they were saying.”
Even from twenty-five miles away, Pikes could smell the bitumen from the plants, and she encountered a lot of people with asthma; a number of them were policyholders who told her they needed new furniture because of smoke damage. “Smoke damage” is hard to quantify and would prove an ongoing source of conflict between adjusters and policyholders. “We wrote some big checks,” she said, “and nothing was wrong with those things.” Pikes has seen a lot in her career, but Fort McMurray managed to surprise her repeatedly. “A lot of people were in debt with an upside-down mortgage,” she told me. “A lot of people had lost their jobs. Many of them were glad their house was burned down.” But it was the real estate prices that really shocked her. “Those houses are not worth that much money,” she said, unable to contain her derision. “You got a million-dollar home with vinyl siding on it. Those houses were built cheap—a $600,000 house in Fort McMurray is built like a $100,000 house in Texas. I’d never pay that much money.”
But when it came to the people, it was different story. “I felt so good in Canada,” she told me. “I would move to Canada. Everyone I met—they were so polite to me. I thought maybe they felt sorry for me or something.”
Most owners whose homes had burned were presented with a choice: take a check that would be significantly less than replacement cost, or rebuild on the same site with full coverage. As high as property values were, they were still down from their peak in 2014 before the price of oil dropped, and the fire drove them down further. Those who still had jobs and means opted to replace their often out-of-date starter homes with bigger, more luxurious houses. Wine cabinets were popular that year, and so were heated floors, gas fireplaces, and jet tubs. Due to the remote location, and the fact that hundreds of houses were starting at once, prices for everything—from two-by-fours to concrete—skyrocketed. Houses that might have cost $200 a square foot to build before the fire jumped to $350, and then kept rising. The rebuild was a multiyear, multibillion-dollar enterprise that would be Fort McMurray’s newest boom, and possibly its last. Builders and tradesmen flocked to Fort McMurray for what promised to be a bonanza.
But before anything could be rebuilt, the wreckage had to be cleared away, and in Fort McMurray, this process was an unusually thorough one—more in keeping with recovery from a war than from a fire. Because of the intense heat and the spalling, even concrete foundations were compromised and had to be removed. Formed of solid cement and laced with steel reinforcement rod, house foundations weigh about fifty tons apiece. Across the city, there were hundreds and hundreds of these bunker-like structures that had to be demolished, excavated, and carted away. Backhoes equipped with hydraulic hammer attachments were brought in to break them apart, but the fragments were still unwieldy. Besides being terrifically heavy, they were often connected by long strands of reinforcement rod. Somehow, these had to be cut apart and broken up, the recyclable steel separated from the useless concrete. There isn’t much call for them in normal life, but there are machines designed for just this purpose.
Concrete pulverizers are what you get when you bolt the jaws of an allosaurus to the end of a backhoe boom, endow them with a thylacine gape filled with serried rows of hardened steel teeth, and empower them with a crushing force of two hundred tons per square inch. To watch these animatronic beasts at work, sometimes several together, as they gnaw at the ruins, reducing torso-sized chunks of concrete hung with entrails of reinforcement rod to bits and pieces one could move with a push broom, is to witness a world, and a scale, that has little to do with human beings or even life, and everything to do with forcing intransigent substances into something they were never meant to be, which is, in a nutshell, the primary function of Fort McMurray.