The fire that destroyed Fort McMurray, the town which prospered by controversial tar sands in Canada

Some called it "Fort McMoney" (strong McDinero), and it is that no city better exemplified the prosperity of the oil boom in Canada as Fort McMurray. Today the town has been almost reduced to ashes by a fierce forest fire that began this week and which forced the evacuation of 90,000 residents. Alberta's Government declared a State of emergency. It is estimated that some 1,600 buildings in the city are
damaged or destroyed. In some neighborhoods, it was affected up to 80% of households. The landscape of ashes left a very misleading picture of what, until a year ago, was Fort McMurray, located in the heart of the region of the tar sands of Canada, in the West of the country. Up to 2015, the biggest concern facing the inhabitants was the housing shortage caused by the fast-paced growth of the city.

In only a few decades, the population of Fort McMurray grew from 35,000 residents they had at the beginning of 1990 to more than 125,000 in 2015. This thanks to a single activity: extraction of oil in an area of about 140,000 km2 of so-called tar sands. Controversial crude oil from Canada that very few wish to huge reserves Canada is a major producer of oil. It has the third proved after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia crude oil reserves. And 95% of these are its deposits of tar sands, located in the province of Alberta. These sites are a mixture of clay, sand, water and bitumen (a derivative of tar) which yields a product similar to petroleum. Crude oil, who is trapped in that mix, is extracted with a special process that does not require drilling the subsoil - which conventionally - used but consists of techniques similar to the opencast mining. Is subsequently proceeds to separate it by injecting solvents together with steam at high pressure.
This whole process is much more expensive than conventional crude oil extraction techniques. In a way that exploitation of the reserves of tar sands was very slow until the end of the 1980s mainly due to that the low prices of crude oil in the world were not competitive. But since the beginning of the century XXI, thanks to the improvement of technology and mainly due to high prices of a barrel of oil in the world, Canada accelerated the exploitation of its oil-sands reserves. And Fort McMurray was at the heart of this growth. Has invested millions of dollars in the region and came to the city thousands of workers seeking one of the jobs offered by the oil industry in Alberta. In 2014 Fort McMurray was at its peak. That year opened a new airport which cost $200 million. "The 'city of the boom' in Canada has a new airport at the height of its growth", then informed the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail. And he said that air traffic had grown 25% in the last year and that the expansion was necessary. "There will be direct flights for employees of tar sands travelling to Mexico and Las Vegas," said.