Jacob Soboroff

You know, I can close my eyes and remember what it felt like to see embers falling like rain, sometimes horizontally, in all directions.

I looked over at Will Rogers State Historic Park and knew that over that ridge, my entire childhood was on fire.

I think that there is a profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on.

What was lost is incalculable.

You know, two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone.

The Palisades Fire was a rekindling of another fire called the Lachman Fire, which allegedly, according to federal prosecutors, was started by an arsonist.

And the root system of some of the native vegetation in the mountains of the Santa Monica Mountains remained ablaze, for lack of a better term.

When these hurricane-force Santa Ana winds started blowing through Los Angeles, and it had not rained virtually the entire rainy season in Southern California, and that fire reignited.

And by that night, on the entirely opposite side of Los Angeles County, because of faulty electrical equipment, is the prevailing theory, the Eden fire also began and led to a whole other series of devastating incidents on literally the polar opposite sides of Los Angeles.

Mm-hmm.

And by the way, the National Weather Service, these meteorologists, two of whom I spent a lot of time with, Dr. Ariel Cohn and Dave Gomberg, warned literally about this exact situation unfolding.

They issued what was known as a particularly dangerous situation warning that went out to all the local fire departments and local officials, elected officials, emergency managers, that said if there is an ignition, there could be catastrophic, will likely be catastrophic consequences.

I mean, I can tell you first about my own family's communication is that it was a group text.

And that, I think, is how we all first sort of understood what was going on.

My brother wrote Big Fire and the Palisades were evacuating and sent a couple of pictures to our thread.

And when you talk to other people who lived in either of the communities...

Text is how everybody was communicating initially.

And I think that there's some great reporting about how the emergency alert system wasn't functioning properly for everybody to get those evacuation alerts.

And I think this not to absolve anybody, but I think that this was happening so quickly that it was hard to.

for the systems themselves to keep up.