The true toll of the Los Angeles fires
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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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:04–0:53
2
What were the immediate impacts of the Los Angeles fires in January 2025?
0:53–2:49
3
How did Jacob Soboroff personally experience the fires?
2:49–10:12
4
What were the causes of the Palisades and Eaton fires?
10:12–16:54
5
How did communication break down during the evacuation process?
16:54–24:34
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Apple News Today
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