National Post (National Edition)
FROM ASH TO DELUGE IN ILL-FATED FORT MAC
Fire, plague & flood
It never rains, but it pours. The old adage has very little, if anything, to do with rain. It is rather a parable illustrating that when bad things happen, we can expect more of them to follow. The always artful William Shakespeare made much the same observation, with his tellingly eloquent flourish: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Either one will do, the anonymous proverb or the famous quotation from the author of authors, when thinking of Alberta, and especially the small city at the heart of its oil industry, Fort McMurray.
Every province has its difficulties, but Alberta is singular in the number and duration of the miseries it has experienced. It has been the chosen target of the messianic save-the-world crowd for decades, seeing its primary industry demonized, its achievements belittled and its attempts at receiving support from the troika of global warming evangelists who run the government — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former environment minister Catherine McKenna and Trudeau’s former principal secretary, Gerald Butts — ignored or foiled.
Oil prices collapsed, massive capital-intensive projects were stalled or outlawed — by protest or the courts — billions in capital was removed, hundreds of thousands of jobs evaporated, huge companies departed, moving corporate headquarters to the saner economies of other countries (chiefly the United States), and callous environmentalists such as Green Party Leader Elizabeth May howled endlessly to shut the province down: this is a familiar and very dreary litany, and what I have listed is only a fragment of a nearly endless scroll.
All of this needs to be seen against the gigantic contribution, when times were better in that province, that Alberta made to the general good fortune of the whole country — the tens of thousands of jobs it created and the multiple billions it sent to the federal treasury.
We would not have weathered the recession of 2008 as well as we did without Alberta.
But today, during the pandemic, it is once more all sorrows and their battalions.
Alberta, of course, is not alone in facing the COVID-19 scourge, but in Alberta’s case, this plague comes after a hundred other links in the chain of misfortune and injury that the province has had to endure. And, as always, at the epicentre of the storm that has been beating the province is Fort McMurray, which has been blasted and blistered the worst.
Fort Mac, as all who have worked there call it, got hit with one of the worst forest fires on record, which, because misery loves timing, came at the tail end of the oil price downturn.
The conflagration brought shock, displacement, anxiety and devastation to Fort Mac. A very pleasant and brave fireman drove me around a month or two after the inferno to show me what he and his fellows had faced during the blaze, and what was left. It was a brutal scene.
All that could be seen in the very worst parts of the town was a forest of stone or brick chimneys. Nothing else was left of what once were homes.
Beyond the blank chimney stacks where homes once stood, there was nothing else to see, nothing but the gutted carcasses of cars, which were all that endured the flames. Ash and rubble lay where once there were neighbourhoods.
Then, the pandemic hit. If the people who had faced such hardships were not Albertans, a notably stalwart people, they would have given up long ago and headed elsewhere. Yet even now, after all of this, poor Fort Mac is facing another trial: it is, as I type, going through what has been described as a once-in-a-century flood.
I do not know if the toying fates have Fort Mac in their claws, but it is enough to stir belief that: (a) there are fates; (b) they are malevolent; and (c) they surely have claws.
The whole downtown core is underwater. Businesses that were already flying on one wing as a result of the fire are now flooded. An ice jam 25 kilometres long has impeded the flow of the Athabasca and Peace rivers, forcing them to overflow into the city and nearby communities.
About 15,000 citizens of a population of roughly 75,000 have been forced to leave their homes. Two hundred people have had to be rescued. The water is halfway up houses, and in some cases, even to their roofs. Hotels, which were closed due to COVID-19, are now open because of the flood. Businesses already decimated by both fire and plague face an added emergency.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney — who to his immortal credit is a politician who doesn’t govern out of a tent and doesn’t self-isolate from his people on account of being premier — visited the area to explore the damage and meet his fellow citizens on Monday.
He called the scene “heartbreaking,” and if ever a word was made for this occasion, that was it.
Having been to Fort McMurray many times, and met both workers and leaders there, I can be bold in speaking of their patience, nerve, industriousness and immense civic strength. And considering what Fort Mac has meant to our country and its economy, and considering its great openness to workers from every province, I think we have the right to hope that it gets some special — yes, special — attention from federal authorities.
I think we have the right to hope that the prime minister, as he puts the Canadian treasury on speed dial for favoured constituencies, will turn his famously empathetic eye to this battered community.
He could even pay it a visit and host a gathering or two with the community (as long as they practise social distancing), to show solidarity. Then again, elephants might flap their ungainly ears and fly, if gravity weren’t so unforgivably imperious.
HOTELS, WHICH WERE CLOSED
DUE TO COVID-19, ARE NOW OPEN BECAUSE OF THE FLOOD.