Alberta · Civic arena
Fort McMurray drinking water hardness is 162 mg/L on OpenStats, plus City Score rankings and local readings.
Civic arena · hometown HUD
#122 of 343
53% City Score XP
5/8 pillars on the board
Decade trail
Fort McMurray packs 5 of eight open-data pillars into its composite standing. Tap a rival below to see how the hometown stacks up head-to-head.
Rivalries on deck
Hardness, pH, and lead from municipal reports on the OpenStats water atlas. This page uses a regional estimate — open the water atlas for method notes.
Full Fort McMurray water quality report →City Score rankingsCompare cities · vs Fort Saskatchewan · vs BrooksHardness guide
Watershed to tap · system map
Source, treatment, and distribution for Fort McMurray from municipal and provincial water records. Open the animated map for the full watershed-to-tap diagram — no nested topic navigation here.
Permits, tax, internet, radon, hazards, drinking water, and sports rankings where a CHL hometown applies.
Fort McMurray sits at City Score rank #122 with a standing of 53%, from 5 of 8 open-data pillars (tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, growth, safety). Missing pillars score at median standing so thin coverage cannot inflate the rank. Rising 76 places versus 2022 (#198 → #122).
Latest owned placements: indoor radon rank #144 of 327 at 105 Bq/m³ survey mean. Full tables and method notes live on each study edition; atlas readings for the same slug open from the topic buttons.
In the 2025 City Score edition, Fort McMurray carries a City Score standing of 53% (rank #122 of 343) with 5 of 8 pillars observed. That sits 4 points above the Alberta peer average across 51 ranked cities. Within Alberta, Fort McMurray ranks #15 of 51 on City Score.
The strongest signal in the current chart is seismic hazard (standing 96%, rank #330 of 343, raw score 0.015). The weakest observed pillar is broadband download (ISED seed tier) (standing 28%, rank #248 of 343).
Drinking-water hardness on the water atlas reads 162 mg/L as CaCO₃ for Fort McMurray. Compare that figure to the hardness pillar on the chart and to the national hardness guide on the hub.
Arena loadout
Arena rank #122 of 343
5/8 pillars · main XP bar
Pillar avg · hardness #181
No placement
Rank #248
Rank #144
Rank #330
No placement
Fort McMurray pillar standing
Eight equal-weight City Score pillars, 2025 panel year.
Source: OpenStats composite / study editions
City Score standing trend
Standing percentage by panel year (higher is better).
Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Source: OpenStats composite timeseries
Achievements
Published residential mill-rate context for Fort McMurray.
The commercial core targeted by downtown revitalization incentives for upgrades and mixed-use work. Franklin Avenue keeps the civic offices
The recreation and culture campus where programming and public art share the same address. The Kirschner Family Community Art Gallery gives
Municipal pages still frame Fort McMurray as the urban hub of Wood Buffalo, not a standalone prairie city adrift from its region.
Where Fort McMurray sits in published building-permit figures for July 2026.
Older hometown notes stay on the desk archive (noindex) — this section shows recent highlights only.
Fort McMurray sits where the Athabasca River meets the Clearwater River, the urban hub of Wood Buffalo in northern Alberta. People here lean on RMWB shorthand the way other towns lean on a city hall nickname, and construction notices still split projects North of Bridge or South of Bridge. Oilsands work sets the economic weather for households and downtown storefronts alike. River Breakup season sets another kind of calendar, when municipal updates shift from winter operations to ice-out and flood watch.
Downtown Fort McMurray keeps drawing civic attention through revitalization incentives aimed at commercial and mixed-use upgrades, while the Lower Townsite stays tied to Keyano College and the recreation work nearby. Franklin Avenue carries the civic address strip. The Snye Waterway gets its annual weed harvest. Abasand shows up on the parks map with an outdoor rink, perimeter trail, and OHV staging. Rural communities such as Janvier sit on the same Wood Buffalo map even when the daily desk is covering the urban core.
Recreation runs deep for a northern industrial town. Birchwood Trails stretch across a long maintained network, and MacDonald Island Park anchors culture programming, including the Kirschner Family Community Art Gallery. WinterPLAY and Canada Day are the civic party nights people plan around. Jubilee Gallery keeps public art in the Jubilee Building lobby. Fort McMurray Today's mix of energy, utilities, sports, and street-level crime coverage is the soundtrack: a river confluence town that also happens to be the oilsands capital of the region.
Drawn from Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Fort McMurray Today, Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
City Score from 2016–2025 across eight open-data pillars. Individual study placements are listed in the panels below.
Each study below is its own ranking. Where a study has more than one edition for this city, the chart shows standing across those years only.
Safety · OpenStats
Statistics Canada does not publish a police-service Crime Severity Index that OpenStats can match to Fort McMurray without copying a province, CMA, or another city. The safety pillar scores at median standing (50%) on City Score, the same rule used for other missing pillars.
Connectivity · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by household-weighted maximum advertised download (Mbps) from ISED National Broadband Data hex ISP rows, with hex-to-city assignment by population-weighted gravity. The headline 2025 score is the dwelling-weighted mean of per-hex technology ceilings (fibre and cable at 1 Gbps, DSL lower). Household-weighted 50/10 availability (%) is stored on atlas rows as avail_5010_pct. Earlier panel years backcast along a national speed curve with city-specific fiber and availability paths.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Composite · OpenStats
OpenStats
Dimensional average of OpenStats open-data pillars for each panel year 2016-2025: tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, population growth, and crime severity. Each series is scored 0-1 within its edition; series in the same pillar are averaged, then all eight pillars are averaged with equal weight. Missing pillars score at median standing (0.5). Crime severity uses StatCan police-service CSI only (Tables 35-10-0026-01 and 35-10-0063-01); cities without a police-service match take median standing on the safety pillar. Growth uses StatCan CSD estimates; construction uses verified municipal building-permit value per resident (population field on each city record, 2021 Census vintage); mill rates and broadband use live rows plus documented year-varying estimates where needed. Radon, water, and PGA may be survey/model vintages carried forward and are flagged when static for more than two years. External commercial livability lists are never inputs.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by municipal drinking-water hardness (mg/L as CaCO₃). Hardness changes slowly; the atlas vintage is carried across panel years and flagged when static for more than two years.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by reported lead (µg/L) on the OpenStats water atlas. Carried across panel years until annual municipal report panels are ingested.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Health · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Health Canada survey mean indoor radon (Bq/m³). Rank 1 is the highest mean. Decade panel years without a new survey carry the CMA survey vintage forward; they are not annual retests.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Growth · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by year-over-year population growth from Statistics Canada annual CSD estimates (Table 17-10-0155-01). Rank 1 is fastest growth. A few places without a clean CSD match use a provincial-path estimate anchored to seed population.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Hazards · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by NRCan peak ground acceleration (higher = stronger shaking hazard). Rank 1 is highest PGA. The seismic model is multi-year; values are carried across the City Score panel and flagged as static until NRCan publishes a new generation.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Livability
The Globe and Mail
2023 data partnership with Environics Analytics ranking 439 Canadian communities on ten livability categories.
Single edition · 2023
Only one published edition places Fort McMurray in this study so far. Open the edition for method notes and the full table.
Livability
MoneySense
Annual composite ranking of Canadian municipalities on economy, housing, crime, health, and weather.
4 editions · 2014–2018
Distinctive local notes and places, each linked to its source.
Project notices routinely sort Fort McMurray construction as North of Bridge or South of Bridge, a local compass that sticks after one winter of driving it.
River Breakup is a named municipal update category, which tells you spring ice-out is civic business here, not just scenery.
Birchwood Trails are billed as a 135-km maintained trail system, long enough that “going for a walk” can mean a half-day plan.
Pulse is the branded RMWB inquiry line residents hit when a dig, a flood notice, or a facility change needs a straight answer.
A sprawling maintained trail network woven through the urban Wood Buffalo landscape. Locals treat it as everyday recreation infrastructure, not a tourist sidebar.
The recreation and culture campus where programming and public art share the same address. The Kirschner Family Community Art Gallery gives the island a gallery stop beyond the rinks and fields.
The commercial core targeted by downtown revitalization incentives for upgrades and mixed-use work. Franklin Avenue keeps the civic offices in the same conversation as the storefronts.
A working waterway on the municipal maintenance calendar, including the annual weed harvest. It is part of how the town keeps its river system usable, not just photogenic.
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