More than 200 firefighters have been mobilized to battle the fire, and members of Canada’s Department of National Defense have also been dispatched to the scene.

The fire is also affecting daily lives. More than a dozen schools have closed, while campfires have been banned.

Canadian health officials have warned that smoke can cause symptoms including sore and watery eyes, coughing, dizziness, chest pains and heart palpitations.

In Alberta, as of May 19, roughly 29,000 people had been forced from their homes by the recent wildfires, though most have returned to their homes in recent days as the fires have diminished in scale and scope.

The blazes in Alberta have revived bad memories of 2016, when a raging wildfire destroyed 2,400 buildings in Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s oil sands region with the third-largest reserves of oil in the world.

In 2021, British Columbia was the site of one of Canada’s worst wildfires in recent decades, when blazes decimated the tiny community of Lytton after temperatures there reached a record 49.6 degrees Celsius, or 121.3 Fahrenheit.