Should Fort Mac Still Exist?

As a reporter covering the Fort McMurray wildfire—“The Beast,” as it would come to be known—I met dozens of people fleeing the disaster, each with a heart-­rending story. A soft-spoken young dad, an immigrant from the Philippines, had doused his boys’ heads with water and begged for Jesus in Tagalog as ten-metre walls of flames licked at their car. There was a hardened woman in her fifties, an oil worker with decades on the patch, whose truck was running on fumes by the time she got to a whistle stop south of Fort Mac. But it is Sarah Davies’s story that still haunts me. Hours earlier she had escaped Fort Mac in socks, running toward the flames as she tried to escape them. She was still dressed in the baggy blue t-shirt she had worn as she watched the fire swallow her home. Only the cement foundation survived. More than anything, she just wanted to get home.

When she did finally return to Fort Mac this July, to that spot, surrounded by charred bikes and SUVs—some of...