Q: There was an article about the fires in Canada on the front page of Monday’s AJC. The article said that the evacuation included the transport of 25,000 out of work camps. What kind of work camps are they talking about?
—Jeanette Galoski, Hiram
A: Oil companies sometimes establish camps for workers where there is a lack of permanent housing in nearby towns or to provide housing in rural areas.
The camps often consist of prefabricated buildings that can serve as living quarters, dining halls, stores, laundry facilities and recreation/workout facilities for oilfield workers.
The buildings can be moved to a booming area and removed when it’s over.
For example, the population of Williston, N.D., the site of a recent shale oil boom, doubled from 2009 to 2015, despite losing 10.9 percent of its population last year as a result of falling crude prices, Canada’s National Post reported last month.
Some work camps in the path of the wildfire that swept through northeast Alberta, Canada, were evacuated and others are being used to house refugees.
More than 88,000 people were evacuated from the town of Fort McMurray, which was a hub of Canada’s recent oil-sands boom.
Q: Which colleges did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates drop out of?
—Rebecca Noell, Woodstock
A: Jobs dropped out of Reed College, a liberal arts and sciences school in Portland, Ore., after one semester and audited other classes.
Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976.
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to form Microsoft with former high school classmate Paul Allen.
Andy Johnston with Fast Copy News Service wrote this column. Do you have a question? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).
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