FORT McMURRAY, Alberta — A massive convoy was underway Friday to move evacuees stranded at oil field camps north of wildfire-ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, through the community to safe areas south of the Canadian oil sands capital. The weather forecast offered a glimmer of hope: a 40 percent chance of rain on Sunday.
As police and military oversaw the procession of at least 500 vehicles, a mass airlift of evacuees resumed. A day after 8,000 people were flown out, 5,500 more were expected to be flown out on Friday.
More than 80,000 people have left Fort McMurray in the heart of Canada’s oil sands, where the fire has torched 1,600 homes and other buildings. The mass evacuation has forced as much as a quarter of Canada’s oil output offline, according to estimates, and is expected to affect a country already hurt by a dramatic fall in the price of oil.
The Alberta provincial government, which declared a state of emergency, said Friday the size of the fire had grown to more than 249,571 acres. No deaths or injuries related to the fire have been reported.
The government said 1,100 firefighters, 110 helicopters, 295 pieces of heavy equipment, and more than 27 air tankers were fighting the fire, but Chad Morrison, Alberta’s manager of wildfire prevention, said no amount of resources would put the fire out. They need rain.
‘‘We have not seen rain in this area for the last two months of significance,’’ Morrison said. ‘‘This fire will continue to burn for a very long time until we see some significant rain.’’
Environment Canada forecast a 40 percent chance of showers in the area on Sunday.
About 25,000 evacuees moved north in the hours after Tuesday’s mandatory evacuation, where oil sands work camps that usually house employees were used to house evacuees. But the bulk of the more than 80,000 evacuees fled south to Edmonton and elsewhere, and officials are moving everyone south, where it is safer and they can get better support services.
The Alberta government is providing cash to 80,000 evacuees from the Fort McMurray fire to help them with their immediate needs. Premier Rachel Notley said her cabinet has approved a payment of $967 per adult and $387 per dependent at a cost to the province of $77 million. She told a briefing in Edmonton that she wants people who were forced from their homes to know that the government ‘‘has their back.’’
Police are escorting 50 vehicles at a time, south through the city itself on Highway 63 at a distance of about 12.4 miles south and then releasing the convoy. At that point another convoy of 50 cars will begin.
All intersections along the convoy route have been blocked off and evacuees are not being allowed back to check on their homes in Fort McMurray.
Sergeant John Spaans, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman, said the goal was to get all vehicles out of the area Friday if the weather, fire, and road conditions cooperate, but officials later said in a release it would take about four days.
Fort McMurray is surrounded by wilderness, and there are essentially only two ways out via road.
Fanned by high winds, scorching heat and low humidity, the fire grew from 29 square miles Tuesday to 39 square miles on Wednesday, but by Thursday it was almost nine times that — at 330 square miles, an area roughly the size of Calgary, Alberta’s largest city. The fire is so large that smoke from it is blanketing parts of the neighboring province of Saskatchewan.
