EDMONTON, Alberta -- As evacuees from the Fort McMurray wildfire arrive at shelters, hotels and homes of friends here, many say they now have a taste of what a wave of refugees experienced in Syria before they made it to Canada a few months ago.
Wedad Rihani, a 68-year-old lawyer, is well placed to compare the two situations. A Syrian, she arrived in Fort McMurray just 70 days before she became a fire evacuee, one of six members of her family sponsored as refugees by her son, Fahed Labek, a chemist in the oil sands town.
"I left fire back home created by humans to come to the fire here," Rihani said, her son providing translation. "Here you can escape; at home there's no escape. Here you get a smile; there you get no help."
Rihani uses a wheelchair and lost her eyeglasses in the rush to evacuate. She said Fort McMurray, even in its current circumstances, was preferable to what she had abandoned. But she said most of the other 25,000 Syrian refugees brought in by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had arrived with less drama.
"A lot of other Syrians went to other cities in Canada where, thank God, there is no fire," she said. "Our bad luck followed. Hopefully, everything will be safe now."
Late Friday, Labek, who is married and has two small children, and his extended family left temporary shelter provided by the Rashid Mosque in the north of Edmonton to check into a hotel. They were among the estimated 25,000 people who fled north from Fort McMurray only to be trapped by the fire in work camps.
Labek's family arrived in Edmonton on Thursday, part of an airlift south that continued Saturday and that, along with an evacuation down the highway, will ultimately move 25,000 people. Heavy smoke Saturday, however, forced the police to reduce by half the size of the convoys to 24 vehicles at a time.
Joining those evacuees Saturday were about 1,500 employees from two oil sands strip mines just north of Fort McMurray as well as a processing site, which were shut down by their owner, Syncrude. Chad Morrison, Alberta's wildfire manager, said the closings were intended to protect employees, adding that all oil sands operations were built to be "highly resistant to forest fires."
Rachel Notley, premier of Alberta, said the government planned to move all the evacuees trapped north of Fort McMurray to the south by the end of Saturday. Notley added that the fire might double in size, extending largely into unpopulated forests. When first spotted and attacked by fire crews on May 1, the fire covered 5 acres, but by Saturday morning it had engulfed 385,000 acres.
With no end to the fire in sight and a reopening of what remains of Fort McMurray weeks away, officials, aid groups and volunteers were dealing with the needs of evacuees, integrating their children into schools and addressing their psychological, financial and social concerns.
Al Rashid Mosque alone has helped about 100 families. Many of those people were sleeping on cots in a basement classroom, including two other Syrians who arrived in Fort McMurray as refugees.
An exhibition hall in Edmonton had about 4,400 cots available, along with a variety of services including veterinary care and insurance claim processing.
Large numbers of refugees have remained in smaller towns and aboriginal reserves between Edmonton, Calgary and Fort McMurray, like Lac La Biche, Alberta.
Throughout Friday, wildfire helicopters and other aircraft flew in and out of Lac La Biche, about 137 miles south of Fort McMurray. In all, 28 helicopters, aerial water bombers and other heavy equipment were on patrol for new outbreaks of fire.
Morrison said that warm weather and extreme dryness -- Fort McMurray has not seen significant rain or snow for two months -- had turned the dense needles of the black spruce that dominates the forest into potent raw material for fire.
Morrison said, large wildfires in the province, like one that burned about a third of Slave Lake, Alberta, in 2011, are typically spread because of strong winds. But the current fire is "fuel-driven," he said.
Once ignited, Morrison said, such fires can leap miles forward, hurling out flaming projectiles. Lightning created within their clouds of ash and soot also spawns new fires.
"This is an extreme, rare, rare fire event," Morrison said, even for Alberta, a province prone to wildfires. "And that's something that's historic for us."
At Lac La Biche, Bryan Davidson, a pilot with the provincial fire service, was geared up and waiting beside his helicopter.
"We're on 10-minute getaway," he said of his seven-person crew. "When conditions are right for a fire, literally every second counts." The helicopter crews are often the first to discover the flames. Their role is to extinguish small brush fires before the flames mutate into raging infernos.
Once Davidson gets his crew off the ground, it heads to the nearest water source -- often a pond created by a beaver dam -- to pick up 270 gallons of water to drop on the fire.