(Bloomberg) -- Cooler temperatures are helping firefighters battle wildfires raging throughAlberta as the blaze retreats from the country’s mainoil-sands facilities around Fort McMurray. Rachel Notley, theprovince’s premier, will travel to the city Monday after the firesknocked out an estimated 1 million barrels of daily production andled to the evacuation of more than 80,000 people.

The inferno, which had been forecast to expand to more than2,500 square kilometers (965 square miles), grew slower thanexpected and now covers about 1,600 square kilometers, Notley saidat a news conference on Sunday. Thirteen new wildfires startedSunday, for a total of 33 fires, little changed from the daybefore. Three are judged "out of control," three are being held and22 under control, Travis Fairweather, a forestry spokesman, said byphone Monday.

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While the fire on Saturday approached operations of SuncorEnergy Inc., Canada’s biggest energy company, there was no damageas firefighters held the blaze southwest of the area. CnoocLtd.’s Nexen operations to the south of Fort McMurray have suffered“minor” damage, said Chad Morrison, a wildfire manager for theAlberta government, said Sunday.

Dig in

The average temperature forecast for Monday was 10 Celsius (50Fahrenheit), dropping from the torrid 30 Celsius last week that hadhelped fan the flames, Fairweather said. Northwest winds areexpected to gust up to 20 kilometers an hour (12.4 miles an hour),with relative humidity of 40%, Fairweather said.

"It should help our crews out there quite a bit after a coupleof really hot, really dry days when they’ve had to really work outthere," he said. "Now we can try and dig in and make a littleprogress here." There are more than 700 firefighters working in andaround Fort McMurray to contain the fire, Fairweather said.

While cooler temperatures present responders with a "greatopportunity" over the next three to four days, fires deep into theforest will likely last for months, Morrison said. The fire thatbegan a week ago probably had a human cause, though that remainsunknown, he said.

‘This beast’

“This beast is an extraordinarily difficult problem,” federalPublic Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told reporters Sunday, in areference to how the fire has been nicknamed. “Because of theweather in the last few hours and the weather forecast goingforward, it would appear that the situation is moderating, perhapsa bit.”

Disruptions to oil production, the lifeblood of Alberta’seconomy, add to a human catastrophe as blazes razed entireneighborhoods in Fort McMurray, the gateway to the world’sthird-largest crude reserves. All of the 25,000 people who had gonenorth to flee the fire have been evacuated south and the majorityof them are in Edmonton, Notley said.

The wildfires covering an area twice the size of New York cityhave led to production cuts of about 40% of the region’s output of2.5 million barrels, based on IHS Energy estimates. The cuts, andthe mass exodus from Fort McMurray, are another blow to an economyalready mired in recession from the oil price collapse.

West Texas Intermediate for June delivery fell 1.7% to $44.93 abarrel at 11:11 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Syncrude operations

Once the fires are under control, oil-sands-mining projects couldbe back to normal production levels in about a week, Morgan Stanleysaid in an e-mailed research note on Monday. In-situ projects,which use steam to extract the oil, could take two or more weeksdepending on the start-up method and pressure requirements, itsaid.

Related: 10 most costly wildland fires in theU.S.

Syncrude Canada, a joint venture controlled by Suncor, shut downits Aurora mine and Mildred Lake operation about 40 kilometersnorth of the city and has evacuated about 1,200 workers. Syncrudehas a capacity for 350,000 barrels of oil a day. Morrison said theoil facilities are highly resistant to fire with their bufferzones.

Smoke reached Syncrude’s Mildred Lake site Saturday, companyspokesman Leithan Slade said in an e-mailed statement. “We willbring operations back online only when it is safe to do so.”

Oil sands and the environment: Quick take

Suncor, Phillips 66 and Statoil ASA have declared force majeure— a provision protecting companies from liability forcontracts that go unfulfilled for reasons beyond their control— on supplies from the region. As the fires are set to moveaway from its oil-sands operations, Suncor said it has begunplanning the restart of production after moving more than 10,000employees, families and Fort McMurray residents out of the region.The restart will happen once it’s safe and when third-partypipelines are available, the Calgary-based producer said.

Husky Energy Inc., controlled by Hong Kong billionaire LiKa-Shing, said Sunday it has completely shut its Sunrise facility,which has a capacity of 60,000 barrels a day and was producingabout half that before the blaze began. Nexen’s operation, with acapacity of 92,000 barrels a day, was shut. Phone and e-mailmessages left for Colleen Brown, a Nexen spokeswoman, seekingcomment on damage to the facilities weren’t immediatelyreturned.

The inferno around Fort McMurray may become the costliestcatastrophe in the country’s history with insurance lossespotentially reaching C$9.4 billion ($7.3 billion) if all homes inthe city are lost. Bank of Montreal cut its second-quarter grossdomestic product growth estimate to zero from 1.5%, citing “severedisruptions to oil production” due to the fires. BMO said theestimate was a placeholder, dependent on receiving more informationon the scope of the disaster.

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