Despite being virtually unknown outside of Canada and the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray has become, in the past two decades, the fourth-largest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. In terms of overtime logged and dollars earned, it is, without a doubt, the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on the continent. In 2016, two years past a decade-long boom that ended with a sudden drop in global crude oil prices, the median household income was still nearly $200,000 a year. Fort McMurray has earned several nicknames over the years, and one of
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