A fire near Cold Lake is bearing down on oilsands operations and curtailing production in the region as employees are told to leave. Out-of-control fires in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are threatening towns and mining operations as crews fight to contain the blazes.

More Yellowhead County residents had to leave their homes Friday, after the county issued a new wildfire evacuation order for two communities and expanded an existing order.

Several Midwestern U.S. states have issued air quality alerts to residents as smoke from Canadian wildfires begins to move south.

Alberta isn’t the only province grappling with fires. Manitoba declared a province-wide state of emergency on Wednesday amid intensifying blazes in the northern part of the province, with the largest evacuation centered on Flin Flon, Man. where at least 17,000 people have fled the blazes.

Mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for communities in remote northern Alberta as the province braces for another day of potentially explosive wildfire activity.

Canada, the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, has long seen its energy output threatened by wildfires that rage through the dense forests of northern Alberta in spring and summer. In 2016, a blaze shut down the massive oilsands mines just north of Fort McMurray, taking more than one million barrels of daily production offline.

Canada’s 2025 wildfire season is off to a busy start as nearly 100 out-of-control fires triggered states of emergency and multiple evacuations on Friday. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire

About 17,000 residents of Manitoba in central Canada have been evacuated because of nearly two dozen active wildfires.

States throughout the Midwest and into the Ohio Valley — including Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia — could also experience moderate air quality on Monday, according to the EPA forecast. It could be a while before those with hazy skies see any relief.