“I’m trapped in the fire. It’s all around me. I love you. Take care of Brayden and Allyson and Brooklyn,” Tamara Ferguson, 42, told her two eldest daughters from a burning hospital in the northern California town of Paradise on November 8. “Make sure they know how much I loved them.”

The death toll from the Campfire rose on Wednesday to 86, with just under 1000 still missing. The flames, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, have decimated almost 400 square miles and almost entirely laid waste to the once thriving 27,000-person town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

‘I just want to break down’: the California wildfire victims living in a parking lot

Hundreds of families who lost their homes in the devastating Northern California wildfires stay in tents and cars at makeshift camps in shopping centre car parks. One young family is living with two young children in a van parked outside Walmart in Chico. Evacuee Alisha Anstrom said: “I’m trying to stay as strong as I can for them. It’s really hard to deal with though. I really just want to break down.” They’re unsure if their house is still standing after being evacuated nearly two weeks ago.

Thanksgiving in Paradise

Residents of Paradise wondered if they would have a Thanksgiving dinner after a fire incinerated the town of 27,000, killing at least 83 people and turning most homes to ash. Many are now homeless, living in evacuation centers across northern California, some camping in tents even as the weather turns cold and wet.
In the nearby town of Chico, prominent chefs Jose Andreas, Tyler Florence and Guy Fieri offered free meals and 8,000 lbs of turkey. Volunteers included firefighters who participated in the evacuation.

“I lost everything so what else am I going to be doing?”

Virginia Partain, 64, a Paradise high school teacher whose home burned down. She asked, still wearing the tie-dyed turtleneck she escaped in. Partain was only able to save her cats, a blanket and her students’ college admission essays. But she described a feeling of intense gratitude for the bare fact of survival. “I sat with my cats last night and I just held them, and I thought, it’s a a new chapter, a new normal, we just have to start a new life.”

Charlene Perry, 58, said that before the fire it had seemed that the heavens were smiling on her. She had been homeless for 18 months in Chico, a pastor and his wife helped her find a trailer in a senior citizens’ mobile home park in Paradise.
“I was being so blessed, Church ladies were giving me things – a beautiful bedspread, pillow, a plate set even though I had a plate set, I was being so blessed left and right. There was a lot of love. People were so happy I finally found a place to live.”
When the fire came, all she escaped with were some blankets she had crocheted. She remembers seeing a neighbour at the mobile home park, engulfed in smoke, seemingly too stunned to move. There was no time to help him and she does not know if he survived. Now, again, she is homeless.

Don Martin, 62, told us about his trailer in Paradise.“I’d planned to die there and I kind of wished I had. It was just right for me and the dog.” A former dental technician and truck driver. Martin suffers from ailments including diabetes and peripheral neuropathy. He has a morphine pump hooked into his spine.

“I haven’t had anything to feel grateful for in a long time.” He described himself as a kind of hermit who was nevertheless thrilled to live in the wooded, peaceful Paradise area with his pitbull mix Ralph and seven cats.

All the cats died in the fire. In the evacuation center he picked up the norovirus. “At least that was not as bad as they say.”

California wildfires fast facts

These are the current numbers as of Wednesday morning from Cal Fire and the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Camp Fire

Location: Butte County
153,336 acres burned
85 percent contained
83 fatalities confirmed
560 unaccounted for
18,886 structures destroyed (14,243 residences, 514 commercial and 4,129 other buildings)