Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
You know, I can close my eyes and remember what it felt like to see embers falling like rain, sometimes horizontally, in all directions.
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.
Chapter 2: What were the immediate impacts of the Los Angeles fires in January 2025?
I looked over at Will Rogers State Historic Park and knew that over that ridge, my entire childhood was on fire.
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 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.
I started by asking Jacob how these two fires began.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Jacob Soboroff personally experience the fires?
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.
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?
Yeah.
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.
So I think that people first and foremost were relying on what they were seeing on television. Local news did, I mean, I think definitionally a public service in being on the air literally for days straight without commercial interruption in order to tell people where they were seeing fire and what was happening. But it was too late for so many people.
I will never forget the scenes that I saw even before I was able to get out to the fire sitting at my desk in the LA Bureau of NBC News. of people abandoning their cars in the middle of the street, literally running for their lives because this all unfolded so quickly. And so I think, you know, it was word of mouth initially.
And I think that when people look back today, that's why so many people say, why couldn't this have been stopped before? If this was going to be so out of control, why weren't there better warnings? Why weren't there more fire trucks pre-positioned?
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Chapter 4: What were the causes of the Palisades and Eaton fires?
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.
I appreciate the governor coming out and meeting me, Kevin, very much. And we'll be talking a little bit. We want to get it fixed. We want to get the problem fixed.
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.
Well, let's talk a little bit about some of what Trump was saying at the time. Again, not yet in office, but on the verge of taking office. He was sharing these incorrect theories about water. He was saying there was no available water for the firefighters to use and that it was largely the fault of Governor Newsom's water policies.
This is a true tragedy and it's a mistake of the governor and you could say the administration. They don't have any water. They didn't have water in the fire hydrants.
Now later it was determined that there was plenty of available water, but because so many fire hydrants and hoses were being used, there wasn't enough water. pressure in the system for firefighters to sufficiently fight the flames but tell me how this played out in that moment in those early days and hours of this disaster unfolding
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.
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Chapter 5: How did communication break down during the evacuation process?
The cost of living in all of these places is high enough already where with an insurance market that makes it extraordinarily difficult, particularly for people whose homes survived the firesā is leading to, I think, prohibitive hurdles for so many people to coming back. And I mean, I can just tell you, they don't know the answers to these questions.
I'm telling you about from the resident's perspective, they don't know what to do or where to go, and they feel like it's a long way off. What do you do when an entire community is wiped off the map? I don't think that there are easy answers and I don't think people are finding them from their politicians, state, local or federal.
Yeah. Well, what are people talking about amongst themselves as you've spoken to residents, people who are considering their next move? What do they talk about having lost in all of this? What do they talk about wanting to preserve in all of this?
I think that there is a profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on. And like when someone dies, and obviously 31 people did in this case, and none of us will ever experience the grief that those families are feeling, what was lost is incalculable. You know, two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone now.
And so everybody has to make individual decisions for themselves. Those same text threads that I detail in the book in real time as the fire unfolded are now lighting up with Hey, did you see that the house down the block is for sale? We're trying to figure out if we can rebuild or if we're going to go live with our family members in another city, if we're going to leave the state entirely.
Those are the conversations that are happening today. And I don't think that the ramifications of what has happened and sort of literally the population shifts that are happening are going to be understood, if not now, you know, even for years to come.
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is a story about climate change, about the present realities of climate change, not just the future of climate change. But there are so many other factors that you've brought up here just in our conversation today.
The politics, the population growth, the fact that these were really very populous areas, the way that disaster communication worked and didn't work for people. Can you help me understand sort of all these different factors and where we are today in mitigating them?
Yeah. One of the lenses through which I looked at this is how the federal government's response has affected or will affect the recovery. And one of the things I did in the aftermath of the fires was embed with NASA and their scientists from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hundreds of JPL and Caltech employees lost their homes in the Eaton fire.
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