(Bloomberg) – Waseem Amin has been making big plans for his return home to Fort McMurray, the Canadian oil-sands town devastated by wildfires that curtailed more than a million barrels of daily crude output last month.
Amin, 38, who spent the better part of a month living in a student housing compound after fires forced 80,000 people to evacuate the town, is counting on rebuilding efforts to give his trucking business a boost following a nearly two-year-long recession caused by an oil glut. He was one of the lucky ones — his apartment largely escaped the fire, he said Wednesday as he made his way to survey the damage.
"Everything is going to pick up now," Amin said, standing outside an information center clutching a bag of supplies. "I have to help the community clean up."
Smell of smoke
Residents are returning to the heart of Canada's oil-sands for the first time since fleeing a fire that began in early May, adding another layer of hardship to Alberta's petroleum-induced economic woes. As roadblocks opened Wednesday morning, people trickled back in campers, trucks and cars, past the hulks of burned trees that covered the hills around the town. The smell of smoke still lingered in the air.
Mike Marchand, a 59-year-old crane operator for Suncor Energy Inc., doesn't feel so hopeful. A town resident for 40 years, he has lived through oil crashes and labor disputes, but nothing like what happened last month, he said.
The day the fire spread to Fort McMurray, Marchand took to the road as propane tanks on trailers exploded around him and the home he built eight years ago burned to the ground. A few months shy of his 60th birthday, he said the time has come to call it quits and retire.
"When you lose everything, it's indescribable unless it happens to you," he said in a telephone interview. "A month later and I still can't come to terms with it."
Returning residents
The returnees mingled with police and clean-up crew at the local Safeway grocery store, which was prepared for a return to business with well-stocked shelves. Residents mowed lawns that had overgrown after a month without care. The hospital was open for business with patients already arriving.
The blaze destroyed about 10% of the city's structures and forced residents to flee past burning trees as embers crossed their windshields. About 40% of the country's oil sands production was curtailed as companies including Suncor and Syncrude Canada Ltd. halted operations and evacuated workers.
"A lot of jobs will be created" in the cleanup and rebuilding, said Adil Iialiyed, a construction worker and immigrant from Kazakhstan, as he tried to catch his dog, which had become loose in the neighborhood. Iialiyed, 31, fled with his family as flames descended a hill to burn homes just a block away from his parents' house.
As people returned to Fort McMurray, more than 2,000 firefighters from as far away as South Africa continued to battle the blaze, which has grown to about 5,800 square kilometers (3,603 square miles) and extended eastward into Saskatchewan.
Output restarts
Home values in the city were down 8% in March from the previous year with the median single-family home selling for C$658,000 ($503,116), according to the Fort McMurray Real Estate Board. Many returnees now begin the process of collecting insurance money.
Oil sands companies have also begun to resume operations with Imperial Oil Ltd. and Statoil ASA among those restarting their sites. Suncor said Sunday that it expects to soon be producing crude from the three sites it closed. Officials worked to restore power and basic services prior to the planned June 1 return date.
The re-opening of the town will be done in phases, the government has said. Those who lived downtown, an area spared from the worst of damage, were among the people first permitted to return to their homes.
On Monday, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced that as many as 9,000 residents of some of badly-burned neighborhoods including Beacon Hill and Abasand won't be able to return until the area is cleaned and potentially-toxic ash removed, a process that could take until September.
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