The people of Fort McMurray have started to return; to begin the long, slow process of cleaning up and getting their lives and businesses back on track. The scale of the devastation in the city is astonishing, with about 2,400 buildings destroyed by the recent wildfire – about 15% of the community – and most of the major infrastructure is damaged or affected.

While none of the oilsands facilities surrounding the city burned, many of them were shut down either as a precaution or because workers had to flee. At the peak of the fire, about 1.2 million barrels per day of oilsands production – a bit more than half of the pre-fire amount – was shut down. Most of that is back online at the time of writing, with the rest returning by the end of June or the beginning of July.

The costs to oilsands producers will take time to assess, but the amounts will be staggering. Analyst Greg Pardy of RBC Dominion Securities Inc. estimates that Suncor Energy Inc. will lose about $928 million of operating cash flow if production is shut down for 35 days at its operations and for 40 days at Syncrude Canada Ltd. (of which Suncor owns a part).

How long Fort McMurray will take to return to a semblance of normal – or what “normal” even will mean – is hard to say. But there is an indication from a similar, albeit smaller tragedy five years ago. In May 2011, a similarly fast-moving wildfire struck Slave Lake, a town of about 7,000 people a four-hour drive southwest of Fort McMurray. About one-third of Slave Lake was destroyed, with 433 buildings burned and 89 more damaged.

I visited Slave Lake the following month so I could tell the stories of people and businesses beginning the rebuild. Ken Giblin, for example, is a 72-year-old Century 21 Real Estate agent who lost five houses, two commercial buildings, a new pontoon boat and a car to the fire. In the aftermath of the Fort McMurray fire, I called him up to see how he and his town had coped with their rebuilding.

“Having gone through it here, I just feel so bad for those people up there,” he says, adding that one of his insurance claims hadn’t yet been settled. “They have a long road of recovery.”

Giblin says things are pretty much back to normal in Slave Lake, although he estimates that at least 25 lots have not been rebuilt: people took the insurance money and opted not to return. There also are apartment buildings that weren’t rebuilt and he estimates that the town’s population is down by about 1,000 people compared with the period before the fire.

Giblin has some advice for McMurrayites: “As bad as it seems right now – and they’ll have a year or two years or three years of tough sledding – it will get better.”

On the plus side, the money that will be pouring into Fort McMurray for the rebuilding will provide a huge shot in the arm for businesses in the region. And, notably, the industrial parks in Fort McMurray that support oilsands operations were not burned. And while housing stock in the city has been sharply cut, there are lots of work camps in the region that have been suffering from low occupancy rates and can house workers while the city rebuilds. Before we know it, the city may well be a humming boomtown again. But that also depends on the price of oil, and not so much on the pace of recovery from the monstrous wildfire.

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