and what is shaping up to be the country's costliest natural disaster.

Fortunately, there are no known casualties from the blaze at the moment,

but thousands of structures have been burned to the ground.

Now, there's also an economic impact.

Fort McMurray is the hub of Canada's oil sands industry.

The east fields produce around 2.3 million barrels a day of oil, more than half of Canada's entire output.

Canada produces about 4 and 1/2 million barrels a day of crude, of which about 3.4 million barrels is exported to the U.S. for a network of pipelines.

Well, the actual damage to the oil sands facilities at the moment is minimal.

Companies have been making sure they start from families to save, and inevitably that means there will be supply disruptions.

So what sort of numbers are we looking at?

Well, it's important to state at the moment that we don't have any verifiable figures.

But analysts reckon anything between 500,000 and 800,000 barrels a day of crude oil production could be forced offline because of the blaze.

Now this is based on comments that we've heard from oil companies operating in the region.

When wild fires had last spread across this part of Canada about a year ago,

around 300,000 barrels a day of production was knocked out, most of which returned by the middle of June.

But this blaze is much worse.

Well, one notable feature this year has been a string of unexpected supply disruptions,

of which the Canadian wild fires could be just the latest.

These disruptions have helped crude rally by more than 60% from its January lows.

At one point in April, more than 2.8 million barrels a day of global oil production was offline.

This helped tighten the market that was a ** supply.