Fort McMurray wildfire (2016)

On May 1, 2016, a wildfire breaks out southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta's oil sands city, and reaches the city on May 3 under strong winds and unusual dryness. About 88,000 residents are evacuated in a day, the north road to the workers' camps becomes a line of cars caught in flames, and nearly 2,400 homes burn. The fire did not directly kill anyone, which sets it apart from Lahaina, but two people die in a road accident during the evacuation. The Insurance Bureau of Canada puts the insured loss at about 3.7 billion Canadian dollars, the country's costliest insured loss up to then, ahead of the 2013 Alberta floods. Temporary housing costs, very high in a city where rents are already steep, weighed heavily, and the interruption of oil sands production, shut down for several weeks, brought the producers' business interruption policies into play. For reinsurers, it is a milestone in the idea that wildfire is no longer a secondary peril in North America. It brought fire spread at the urban interface into models, and had wildfire risk zones written into the rates of several Canadian insurers.