Fort McMurray region mayor keeps wildfire challenges in perspective
Melissa Blake, the mayor of the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, was at the municipal office in downtown Fort McMurray on Tuesday, May 3, when the fire they had been fighting and watching since Sunday appeared in the distance, near the Abasand neighbourhood.

thestar.com
May 16, 2016
By Katie Daubs

As her family walks down a suburban Edmonton street, Melissa Blake’s six-year-old son Jason giggles mischievously, perched atop his dad’s shoulders. He has been collecting leaves from the trees at this fantastic new height.

“What are you dropping on my head?” his father Peter Jurak asks.

His mom smiles at her son and tells him to leave the trees alone. She is a mayor in exile but still a mayor, after all. The trees of her jurisdiction are 400 kilometres away in Fort McMurray, along with the tomatoes beginning to sprout in her greenhouse and the backyard that is perfect because it is hers. The tomatoes are dead now, and the fish in the backyard pond? She’s not sure.

Of course, her family is lucky. Their home is one of the 90 per cent of structures that survived when the wildfire raged into her city. There are 2,400 buildings that were damaged or destroyed, including the homes of fellow councillors, emergency responders and people working around the clock at the local operations centre.

Blake, the mayor of the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, was at the municipal office in downtown Fort McMurray on Tuesday, May 3, when the fire they had been fighting and watching since Sunday appeared in the distance, near the Abasand neighbourhood.

“Does a captain who goes down with the ship mean the mayor has to burn with the city?” she thought, looking at the flames in the distance.

She eventually rushed to her family - husband Peter, and sons Jackson and Jason. They left the city and found shelter in an oil camp, but the next night, the fire seeped into her dreams: At 4 a.m., she awoke, worried it was climbing a hill nearby. “I didn’t know how I was going to evacuate my family next, we were in the north, and there wasn’t another road out,” she says.

Wildfires are a part of life in Alberta. One government spreadsheet documenting the province’s wildfires between 1999 and 2014 has more than 25,000 entries, with causes that run the gamut from lightning, to grudge-based arson, to fires abandoned by berry pickers or picnickers. They aren’t rare. They just usually aren’t this big, and in Fort McMurray’s case, usually not this close.

Back in 1995, there was a 40,000-hectare blaze “flaming out of control” just south of Fort McMurray, in the tinder-dry forest. It closed Highway 63 for a number of days, and sparked panic in the city of then-35,000, as gas stations ran out of fuel and grocery stores ran low on food. In 2002, a similarly large fire stranded the city.

The 2016 wildfire was bigger than anything that came before, and as of this writing, it is still out of control near the Saskatchewan border, its cause is still unknown.

Blake is 46 years old. She was born in Quebec but moved to Fort McMurray when she was 12, when her parents came for work, like so many before and since.

Throughout the 20th century, government and industry experimented with ways to harness the economic power below the ground here. The Toronto Star, in 1967, heralded a new extraction method: “Alberta Oil Sands may be a Bonanza.”

For years, men and women across Canada made the journey up Highway 63 to work in the camps. In the last couple of years, with the falling price of crude, the economy has slowed. “The wildfires come at an inopportune time,” reads one analysis from National Bank, “compounding pressure on an already shaky Alberta economy and likely robbing the province of some needed corporate income tax and royalty revenue.”

Everyone wants to get back to work. Earlier this week, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and representatives from the oil industry hoped that would happen soon.

Fort McMurray, which has smelled like smoke in the aftermath of the fire, usually has a forest fresh smell, especially after the rain.

“If you’re in the pit of industry you can smell the oilsands, and with the construction, dust is another one,” Blake says, as she walks the family’s excitable pug Louie.

She has long brown hair with a hint of auburn in the sun. Her shirt, one of the few she grabbed quickly, has gemstones on it, and she is missing one of her French manicure acrylic nails from her right hand, lost somewhere north of the city.

She has been on council since she was 28, when she made good on a New Year’s resolution to make a difference: “Of course the difference I thought I wanted to make then was better street names and curbside recycling,” she says, smiling. “We still don’t have better street names, but I do have curbside recycling.”

She served two terms on council and has been mayor since 2004.

“She always gets the job done,” says evacuee Kevin Lewis, from a hotel lobby in Lac La Biche. “I know she loves the community. This has probably devastated her.”

She says the welcoming spirit of the community goes back, to the First Nations who were here thousands of years before anyone else, and welcomed the European traders, she says. People here have a common kinship, born out of the fact that most have come from somewhere else, leaving everything behind to start fresh.

She calls the outpouring of support from across Canada and the world unreal, and speaks about the generosity of the oil camps, the First Nations groups, and the airline companies. She has cried more over the good wishes than anything else: “I can stand strong in the face of tragedy but I am weak in the face of compassion.”

Blake came back to Fort McMurray on Sunday, five days after being forced out.

She saw the devastation, the perplexing patterns of its mercy: The houses burned down, but the Canada Post boxes intact, the driveway with two vehicles, one burnt to a crisp, and the other pristine, like someone just came home.

Every day, Blake is on conference calls and planning, meeting with provincial, federal, and local leaders in between loads of laundry. Her council met in Edmonton on Wednesday. Her two sons had their first day of school this week.

Blake knows that this tragedy is going to follow a defined arc. People are already beginning to grow frustrated, the honeymoon phase, with the love from across the country, is going to give way to the realization of the challenge ahead.

She is happy for the support of the province, which excels at the background work for re-entry, and has taken charge on that front. The focus of her municipality will be on rebuilding.

She wants to be home, but she doesn’t want anybody in peril.

In the lobby of her mother’s Edmonton condo where she is staying, several older couples walk by.

“You’ve been doing really well on television,” one woman tells Blake. “I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure.”

Another woman asks the question everybody is thinking. When will she be home?

“Pretty soon,” Blake says. “That’s all a matter of perspective.”