‘I’M GOING TO DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GET...BACK TO NORMAL’
One year after Fort McMurray wildfires, small businesses struggle to bounce back
Fire almost destroyed Howard Ewashko’s family business one year ago when a wall of flames descended on his sawmill north of Fort McMurray.
Today, the president of Northland Forest Products says people are still amazed the operation survived.
“Everybody who drives by can’t believe it, what we saved, because you can see the burn right down to the side — basically on three sides of us,” Ewashko said Wednesday.
“I don’t know who was looking after us, but we got very lucky.”
In no small part, it’s due to the resilience of family members, employees and firefighters who stayed last May to battle a blaze known as “The Beast,” saving the company’s buildings — and a massive pile of 800,000 logs in a storage area — as flames rising to 200 feet approached.
One year after the Fort McMurray wildfire burned through a swath of land about the size of Prince Edward Island, business has returned to the Wood Buffalo region, albeit with major changes and many challenges ahead.
“There still is a ways to go for a lot of people and a lot of businesses ... (until) we see a new normal,” says Alexis Foster, executive director of the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce.
Little has been normal in the face of the most expensive insured disaster in Canadian history, with the tab running at $3.7 billion.
The human toll on the region has been enormous. Many people lost their homes and livelihoods; two people died in a traffic accident during the disaster.
On the economic side, an entire city was evacuated for weeks, forcing virtually all of the municipality’s 3,900 businesses to close.
One study for the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction pegs the direct and indirect costs of the wildfire at $9.9 billion.
Much of the region’s crude oil production stopped last spring as oilsands workers were forced to flee.
A Conference Board of Canada report says total oil production losses totalled 47 million barrels, costing petroleum producers about $1.4 billion in revenues.
Looking back, the fire likely marked the bottom of Alberta’s punishing two-year recession, says Todd Hirsch, chief economist with ATB Financial.
Statistics Canada reports 42,000 workers in Wood Buffalo lost a total of 7.6 million work hours in May and June. Some 85 per cent of employees in the natural resources sector reported losing work time.
“For most of the economic indicators, the summer of 2016 — kicked off by the forest fires in May — that really was the nadir ... the lowest point of the recession,” says Hirsch.
It’s easy, however, to only focus on the losses and costs.
Nothing speaks to the resiliency of the community — and its entrepreneurs — than the fact so many people returned and so many businesses reopened.
Melissa Blake, mayor of the Wood Buffalo regional municipality, estimates about 73,500 people are living in Fort McMurray today, compared with 82,000 residents in the city (and the surrounding shadow population) before the catastrophe.
It’s not yet known how many companies went out of business due to the disaster, which came on the heels of the oil price collapse.
“When the wildfire occurred, it created a disruption that was difficult for our local businesses that were already adapting to a new environment,” the mayor said Wednesday.
Across the region, 277 businesses were either destroyed in the fire or located in a restricted area affected by the blaze.
Not surprisingly, results are all over the map for companies that are back in business.
Kristi Hines, who runs a health-care business that provides occupational health services in the region, had to evacuate in a hurry one year ago, like thousands of other Fort McMurray residents.
The founder and director of Hines Health Services found refuge at Shell’s oilsands site with her three children, and they flew to Calgary. The family stayed with her sister, with the children enrolling in local schools.
After a few weeks in Calgary, Hines received a call from an oilsands company that needed mobile occupational health services. She commuted up to Edmonton for three weeks, operating out of a hotel lobby with her staff, before returning to Fort McMurray in July.
“At the time, we almost were ready to settle into Calgary. But there was just no way. I love my business and you put everything on the line for your business,” she says.
Since returning to Fort McMurray, the company has doubled its revenues and workforce. However, it’s not been without personal and professional obstacles, including $60,000 in business losses due to the fire, her home being robbed during the evacuation, and her rental property burning down.
“It hasn’t been easy, but I’m an optimistic person and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get up and running and back to normal.”
Ewashko says the blaze has slowed the overall pace of business in the community. For his company, the fire-related losses are in the millions due mainly to lost production.
But the wildfire, which he says came “as close as it could get to us actually losing everything,” didn’t destroy the business created by his parents 46 years ago.
“I think we underestimated the impact it had on us, but we are climbing and starting to get back to normalcy right now on where we want to be.”