Town to help California wildfire victims on Thanksgiving

The town of Lincoln, California, will help the wildfire victims try to have a happy Thanksgiving on Thursday.

Residents of the Sacramento suburb — population 47,000 — are putting aside their own Thanksgiving Day plans to serve meals to those who have been displaced by the widespread destruction.

"It's going to be a good night out to get their minds off what's happened," one of the organizers, Jeannette Bermudez, told NBC News on Monday.

The event was "thrown together pretty fast because all of this happened so fast", said another organizer, Jack Montgomery, 38.

Lincoln is about 70 miles south of the Camp Fire wildfires, which burned more than 150,000 acres in Northern California, decimating 11,713 homes, destroying the town of Paradise, killing at least 81 and leaving hundreds missing.

The smoke from the fires has been so thick that schools were closed in Lincoln.

"All of last week was bad," Jeannette Bermudez, a medical receptionist in Lincoln, told NBC News.

She said she was watching the news about the damage last week with her 9-year-old son. "He said, 'What are we going to do about it?'" Bermudez said.

She decided to put together a Thanksgiving dinner for those who have been displaced, hundreds of whom were staying in hotels around Lincoln.

"I reached out to a friend about cooking some turkeys and taking them to the hotels," she said.

Others wanted to help too, so they launched a Facebook event. The dinner started becoming bigger and bigger.

The local fire department held a turkey drive that resulted in more than 100 turkeys being donated. The city of Lincoln offered its event space, McBean Pavilion, for free.

A local casino offered buses for transportation to and from hotels. Companies were donating games and arts and crafts to keep children busy. Townspeople and local restaurants and stores were cooking food for the event.

Montgomery, who works as a landscaper in Lincoln, is cooking 20 of the donated turkeys and said that he and his family will spend the day serving fire victims.

"A lot of people gave up their Thanksgiving dinners at home to be able to serve food and talk to people," he told NBC News.

Heavy rains expected on Wednesday in Northern California could hinder search teams sifting through ash and rubble for the remains of victims of the deadliest wildfire in the state's history, as well as bring more misery to evacuees who have yet to find permanent shelter.

Up to 8 inches of rain is forecast to fall by Friday in areas around the town of Paradise, a community of nearly 27,000 people 175 miles northeast of San Francisco that was largely incinerated by the Camp Fire.

A missing-persons list compiled by the sheriff's office was revised downward to 699 names on Tuesday from a high of more than 1,200 over the weekend.

The number has fluctuated widely over the past week as more individuals were reported missing and some initially unaccounted for either turned up alive or were confirmed dead.

CHINA DAILY-Reuters