Jacob Soboroff

This was like the pride of the community when this thing was built.

The weight of it all, I think, is very, very intense to think about.

What was it about this place that made it so special and made it so popular?

I thought I was going to wake up this morning and it's going to be a bad dream.

I look around the town, the neighborhood, the place that I grew up in.

I talk to my friends, who I spent so much time with on these streets, and it's hard to imagine what comes next and what happens next.

There's politics on all levels.

There's the local politics in Los Angeles.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on a diplomatic mission to Ghana on behalf of the Biden administration.

Right.

Despite the warnings of the fire.

And there's a lot of anger in parts of Los Angeles, particularly in the Palisades, because of that.

And then President-elect Trump was monitoring all of this and almost live tweeting on his own social media platform an extraordinary amount of disinformation about what was happening on the ground.

And I think all of these things converged in the moment to both increase the levels of anxiety for people on the ground and confuse people in the aftermath about what had actually happened and how and where you go from here.

And then the

Just days, weeks after the fire, President Trump was sworn into office again, and one of his first trips was out to Los Angeles during the aftermath of the fires in order to take a look.

And that too was an extraordinary moment between Governor Newsom, who I spoke to at length for the book, and the president, the newly sworn in president for his second term, about how politics plays into disaster recovery today.

It's unavoidable and how undoubtedly the decisions made by this administration will affect the future outcomes of future natural disasters on this scale and at this scope.

You know, there was certainly low to no pressure during the fire.

And I think that sort of the for me, the part of the book and the incident that sort of sums up best how the firefighters felt about why the pressure was so low in the hydrants, despite the fact that there was in the Palisades, 117 million gallon reservoir, the Santa Ynez reservoir that was empty as a city controlled reservoir and it was under maintenance and repairs.