How Alberta’s wildfire response has improved since Fort McMurray

The Fort McMurray wildfire forced nearly 90,000 to evacuate 10 years ago and was a wakeup call for those in charge of fighting wildfires.

Ten years ago the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history rocked the northern Alberta community of Fort McMurray.

The fire that forced nearly 90,000 people from their homes was a wakeup call for those in charge of fighting the flames.

In Part 2 of Fort McMurray: A Decade After Disaster, we explore how the May 2016 wildfire known as The Beast changed Alberta’s approach to fighting wildfires.

• Part 1: From ‘not so bad’ to ‘holy cow’: The Fort McMurray wildfire, 10 years later

Wildfire preparedness

People returned a month later to find neighbourhoods flattened, more than 2,400 homes and businesses lost.

“2016 was certainly an eye opener for a lot of people and to have a better understanding of the negative impacts of wildfire,” Fort McMurray forest area manager Paul St. John told CTV News Edmonton.

“It’s going to take some time to rejuvenate the whole area.”

In an effort to stop a disaster on the same scale from happening again, fire prevention experts have been hard at work.

In the years since the 2016 fire, crews with Alberta Wildfire have treated more than 10.5 half-square kilometres of forest around Fort McMurray, thinning out brush and pruning low branches on trees, to keep the fire from spreading from the forest floor into the canopy.

What happened in Fort McMurray changed the provincial wildfire strategy. The season now officially starts one month earlier in March, hiring and training staff, and mobilizing equipment to high-risk areas that much sooner.

Improving communication between Alberta Wildfire and community leaders was a major lesson from 2016, Alberta Wildfire information manager Christie Tucker told CTV News Edmonton.

“We’re moving into unified command. We’re working closely with all the other departments in the provincial emergency coordination centre, we are doing exercises with our municipal partners, so that communication, you know who to talk to,” she said.

Along with tracking lightning strikes in near-real time, Alberta Wildfire now also uses artificial intelligence to help predict where and when fires could ignite.

New wildfire equipment

Since 2022, helicopters equipped with night vision have allowed crews to fight fires at night, when fire activity is typically low, and that fleet is expanding this fire season.

“It gives us a better chance to get in there before we see extreme fire behaviour, where it’s unsafe for firefighters and aircraft to fight,” Tucker said.

More planes that can skim water from lakes are on order, scheduled for delivery by 2031.

Altogether, it’s a major response as wildfires become more threatening in Alberta and across Canada.

In the decade since Fort McMurray, the number of wildfires has stayed relatively flat, averaging about 1,200 fires per year.

The area they burn has varied wildly. More than 6,000 square kilometres were torched in 2016. The damage then ebbed and flowed until a record-setting summer in 2023, when fire scorched more than 22,000 square kilometres.

Despite the firefighting adaptations, Tucker describes the last three fire seasons as “intense.”

The Town of Jasper was the latest community to be hit by a so-called “unstoppable” wall of fire.

“I do believe there’s nothing we could’ve done. There’s no amount of resources or firefighters or air tankers that could’ve stopped that fire,” Christine Nadon, the town’s incident commander, said in 2025.

Fire has threatened Fort McMurray again in recent years. Some of the same neighbourhoods that burned a decade ago were evacuated in 2024 as fire approached but never reached the city.

“A lot of it has went into that preparedness,” Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo regional fire chief Jody Butz said. “You know, ‘Spend a penny, save a pound.’”

Butz knows wildfires are a fact of life for a city surrounded by forest, and Fort McMurray residents know that better than most, which is why the chief says he’s as upfront as possible when the community is threatened by nature.

“Everybody deserves to know the level of risk that they’re in,” Butz said. “It’s our obligation to share that with them with the information that we know. That’s the change, that’s the shift, and I think everyone appreciates it.”

A decade after disaster, officials in Fort McMurray are confident they’re better prepared, along with the rest of Alberta.