There’s more to Fort McMurray than oil sands – it’s a real community | Aritha van Herk

Raging wildfires have brought an ill-informed focus on this quintessentially Canadian place, which had a character long before the extraction plants

Fort McMurray is a real place, not a Dante-esque metaphor for hell, despite the wildfires currently raging, which has forced its entire evacuation.

An urban service area at the heart of the municipality of Wood Buffalo in north-eastern Alberta, one of Canada's western provinces and currently in a state of emergency, it is not some frontier gold rush town huddled under a blanket of perpetual snow. It is not a work camp, although different work and service camps located at the mining sites, from 20 to 100 miles away, circle it. And it is not actually very far north in Canadian terms: the boreal forest just nudges the edge of the near north, and the far and the extreme north (yes, Canada has a near, far, and extreme north) are much farther beyond. It lies roughly between the longitudes of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and no one would dare to call either Edinburgh or Aberdeen remote.