Shamita Basu

This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shamita Basu.

Today, the lasting impact of the Los Angeles fires.

On January 7th of 2025, Los Angeles County experienced the most destructive series of fires it had ever seen.

That's Jacob Soboroff, a senior reporter at MSNOW in Los Angeles.

He was working that day at the NBC studio when the fires broke out.

Jacob grew up in the Palisades, and when he heard that the neighborhood was ablaze, he set out to cover the fires there.

Jacob spent the next several days on the ground reporting live on the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire.

Together, they burned for over three weeks and decimated over 16,000 homes and buildings, including the home where Jacob grew up.

31 people died from their injuries, and hundreds more deaths are being attributed to smoke inhalation and other conditions.

Now Jacob is out with a new book called Firestorm, The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster.

It's a harrowing real-time account of what happened, why fires like this are likely to keep happening, and why just over a year later, the work of recovery is far from over.

I started by asking Jacob how these two fires began.

Yeah.

You spoke to lots of families who were evacuated, who were at risk of losing their homes, who didn't know what the next day or the day after that would look like.

How would you describe communication for people on the ground who were actually in what were considered dangerous zones?

I remember hearing from friends in the area that they felt their best source of information at the time was an app.

I mean, what was the official guidance that people were getting from government?

And when did it come and what did people make of it?

I mean, what were the sort of kind of official channels of communication?