The costliest wildfire, and the lessons we’re ignoring

JACOB SOBOROFF: The Great Los Angeles Fires, it’s not some farfetched fantasy scenario. I witnessed it happen with my own eyes, and it will undoubtedly happen again in a community near you or your very own community. If we can center the fact that this is happening and then if we think about who does get left behind, who wins, who loses, I think we can start to plan for these things better. There are ways to go through this together that don’t feel so isolating, or require so much grief and so much destruction like what we saw here.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Jacob Soboroff, cited as one of TV’s best news journalists, now a correspondent for MS NOW. Jacob was an on-the-ground reporter during 2025’s catastrophic LA wildfires, and he’s released a new book about the disaster called Firestorm. One year out from the LA fires, Jacob talks with me about the lessons from the costliest wildfire in US history, sharing both cautionary miscues and inspiring heroics that have implications for any crisis, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Jacob Soboroff, senior political and national reporter for MS NOW and author of the new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires in America’s New Age of Disaster. 

Jacob, thanks for joining the show.

SOBOROFF: Bob, thanks for having me.

SAFIAN: So we’re now about a year after the LA fires. You covered the fires on the ground, personally lost your childhood home. There were so many losses across LA, lives, homes, neighborhoods, a real tragedy. You’re no stranger to intense reporting environments. You’ve covered the war in Ukraine, for instance. Why did this situation compel you to write a book? What did you want a broad audience to know and understand about the fires?

SOBOROFF: I think the truth of the matter, Bob, is I didn’t understand what it was that I was experiencing in real time as I was standing there watching my childhood home and my childhood memories carbonize before my eyes in what became the costliest wildfire event in the history of the United States. And so I have the privilege and I’m afforded the opportunity to, as a correspondent, as a reporter for MS NOW, in the moment be there, but then stop in the aftermath to say, “How do I put the pieces together?” I did the same thing when I wrote Separated about covering the family separation crisis in 2018. It’s not really possible to wrap your head around these things as you are there in the moment on live television experiencing, I think, so many feelings, profound grieving and loss and confusion about how it could have happened and why, and whether or not it’ll happen again and what it means personally and what it means for the city, Los Angeles, I love so much, and what it means for our planet and our country.

Copy Link“The fire of the future”

SAFIAN: You grew up in the Palisades, which were the heart of the fires. For our listeners who haven’t been there, can you describe the Palisades? What it looks like, what type of place it is, and then what happened when the fire swept through and the aftermath?

SOBOROFF: Pacific Palisades is a coastal enclave, I think you could say, in between Santa Monica and Malibu, the iconic Malibu, and it’s nestled along the Pacific Coast. And it’s actually on the absolute opposite side of Los Angeles County from Altadena where the Eaton fire also burned. And the reason it’s the costliest wildfire event in the history of the country is that both of these massive urban conflagrations unfolded at the same time.  The Palisades fire due to a holdover fire from an arson fire seven days earlier up at the top of Lachman Lane in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Eaton Fire in Altadena because of, the prevailing theory goes, faulty electrical equipment that energized and led to a spark, that when there were hurricane force Santa Ana wind gusts 80 miles per hour or greater, which by the way, were predicted by the National Weather Service as a particularly dangerous situation, one spark like that led to what they knew was going to be a catastrophic situation.

And so the Palisades, the fire raced down from the Santa Monica Mountains and engulfed the community of tens of thousands, and the same exact thing happened in Eaton Canyon on the other side of Los Angeles County engulfing Altadena.

SAFIAN: You said that the winds were predicted. There are some folks who talk about how the conditions were unprecedented, these hurricane force winds and dry landscape and densely populated homes altogether. Folks weren’t really prepared to handle what unfolded.

SOBOROFF: No, definitely not, and growing up in the Palisades, I evacuated the house that we lived in as a kid, and you always return home and the house is fine. And certainly, there have been homes lost in these fires, but nothing like this. Nothing like thousands of homes, 31 people killed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. This was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen, and as you mentioned, the conditions were such that we had received barely any rain at all in the late part of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025, and so Los Angeles was a tinder box ready to go.

And I think what I’ve uncovered, discovered, learned about what it was that I experienced was that this was really the fire of the future. I thought it was a time machine into my past, but really, it was a look into the future that my children and our children will inhabit. And when I say the fire of the future, this was a senior emergency manager working for the federal government that said to me in a clandestine meeting after the fires, who this guy had been to every mass casualty fire in the last five years working for the federal government, there’s not one proximate cause. And certainly, there’s lots of investigative reporting to be done about whether or not there were predeployed firefighters in the right places or the reservoir was full, and it wasn’t full and should have been and who’s to blame for that? Or should Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, have been in town or out of town? Did Gavin Newsom do what he said? Did Donald Trump’s misinformation and disinformation affect this as the president elect?

But really, this man, Jonathan White, from the Commissioned Health Service Corps, said to me, he took my notebook and he said, “Let me draw an X on it.” And on the forums of the X were obviously climate change, infrastructure falling apart, changes in the way we live, thousands of electric car batteries, another new technology exploding during the fires. And then the big one is the misinformation and the disinformation in terms of how people got notified, or didn’t, about what was happening in Los Angeles. And all of those things together is what made this not only the Great Los Angeles Fires, but also in some measure, the new age of disaster, America’s new age of disaster where it isn’t just a spark. It’s a spark combined with our politics, it’s a spark combined with the ways we live, it’s a spark combined with hurricane force winds in bone dry Los Angeles in the middle of the winter. It’s all of those things combined.

Copy LinkFinding hope amidst disaster

SAFIAN: You write in the book about people fighting to save their homes or spraying down their own property with flames all around them. What’s our individual responsibility in a disaster versus what we should be expecting of our government? The tales of people spraying down their own houses, it seems dangerous.

SOBOROFF: I think it certainly was. My own brother spent a long time considering whether or not to leave their house that ultimately burned down that he was living in, his in-laws’ home. And I know many stories like that, that people didn’t leave till the very last second, and I think it’s human nature to want to stand up and defend what is yours. These men and women of the LA County Fire Department, of the LA City Fire Department, of the mutual aid efforts from all over not just Southern California, but the American West and Mexico and Canada, firefighters came from everywhere, thousands and thousands of firefighters. They did everything they could to stop this blaze.

There’s a firefighter, Eric Mendoza, who I write about, who laid on his stomach in the middle of El Medio Street in the Palisades with his hose, two and a half diameter hose, biggest hose they could flow open full bore with thousand plus degree temperatures, automobile metal melting around them, and saying to himself, “I’m going to have black shit in my lungs and be coughing up stuff for days and weeks. I can barely see. I need to go into a house to wash my eyes out.”

The question is what’s our government’s role? Our government’s role is to provide services to us to mitigate and ideally stop, but the reality is it’s not going to be possible. And as I said, are there questions to ask about could there have been more pre-deployed firefighters in the Palisades? Of course, those are important questions to ask. But to me, it’s also as much a story, if it’s a story about failures, it’s a story about hope, because I got to meet and spend time around incredible people, not just the firefighters from the Palisades and from Altadena, wildlife biologists who studied the animals that were the first to repopulate these areas, federal government employees like the meteorologists that predicted this stuff. All of them give me hope in the way in which they have approached this. Day laborers, by the way, who are out rebuilding and cleaning up, despite the fact that they’re under the crosshairs of this administration.

I always find that in a catastrophe, there are hopeful threads. It’s easy to think about the negative parts of this, but to me, I’m also as uplifted as I’ve ever been after having a really hard year, and I think that that’s what this book was for me as much as anything, which was a cathartic process to work through.

SAFIAN: Yeah. It sounds like you were working through emotional things for yourself. As much as you were gathering information and storytelling about others, you were exploring for yourself what all those feelings were like that you were experiencing.

SOBOROFF: As a person with a personal therapist and a couple’s therapist, it was just one other project to go deep into my soul. And I really needed it, I think, because for me too, it was a confluence of many things. If you want to read this book for the politics, you’ll read about Stephen Miller’s wife contacting me at the height of the fire for me to go check on their family home, Stephen Miller’s parents’ home, and these are, I would say, journalist source adversarial relationships that I’ve had over the years. But for a brief time, I thought, perhaps it would bring us closer together. Did it? No, not necessarily, and I think it’s a sign of the politics of the times, but that story to me was a moment where I stopped and said, “What are we doing? What is this really all about? Why are we out here, and why are we at each other’s throats constantly?”

Katie Miller later went to work for Elon Musk and DOGE, and Donald Trump, who spread so much dangerous misinformation about the causes of the fire, so much so, he released billions of gallons of water into the Central Valley of California, flooding farm fields under the guise that it would stop or help or prevent or help recover the people in LA from the fire, did nothing of the sort. There’s so much politics that goes into all of this you’ll read as well, and as well as Gavin Newsom’s relationship with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and how that might have been better than you think going into the fires, and it unraveled because of the fires.

Copy LinkHow government systems respond during crises

SAFIAN: From the outside, when a disaster like this happens, it can be confusing because you’ve got all these layers of government interacting. You’ve got local services and officials like Mayor Bass in LA, and then at the state level, you’ve got Governor Newsom, and then at the federal level and FEMA and the White House. How do all of these interact? Is it a choreographed dance? Does it shift from outbreak to clean-up to rebuilding and recovery? What kind of sense did you get of that system, or is it a system?

SOBOROFF: I was in New York, it was my seventh day of school at NYU as a freshman on 9/11, and I’ll never forget that day ever, and when I was on the ground in the Palisades on the first day of the fire, it very much reminded me of the experience I had as an NYU freshman watching all the different parts of the municipal and state and federal governments try to marshal the resources that they had to protect all of us that were in New York during the attack on the World Trade Center. And there was some element of it that just felt like déjà vu, being in LA and in the Palisades as these fires unfolded, and I think that it’s a couple of things. One is people look to the leaders to be that steady hand. Whether or not you like Rudy Giuliani today, everybody remembers the role that he played on that day.

And I think that in LA, it was the same thing, although we have a very different political system in Los Angeles where the mayor is the mayor of the city of LA and was responsible for the Palisades. The County Board of Supervisors represents millions more people, and they were responsible for Altadena. You have the governor of the state who happened to be down in the desert just a couple of hours away because President Biden was here, then you’ve got the President-elect weighing in from the sidelines, Donald Trump. And what I will say is just by the good fortune of President Biden being in town, Gavin Newsom was able to get face-to-face with him to get a major disaster declaration issued within hours of the fire starting, and so from literally the most senior levels of the federal government down to the local levels, everyone happened to be in one place on that day.

SAFIAN: As it moves forward, maybe once the fires are more under control, does it become more systemic then in how rebuilding is done and how recovery is done? Or again, is that like each time we have a disaster, we’re figuring that out again for the first time?

SOBOROFF: There are systems in place, and there should be seamless ways of doing this, but unfortunately, politics has gotten in the middle of a lot of this. And what you’ll read in the latter parts of the book is that once the president-elect became the president, many of the entities that were involved in the relief in the recovery were decimated because of DOGE and because of cuts, and I’m talking about some of the meteorologists from the same National Weather Service that predicted this fire. I’m talking about at NOAA, the billion dollar disaster registry that tracks fires like this, they got rid of it because they didn’t want to be talking about climate change, so there will never be an official US government tally of the cost of the Palisades and the Eden fires.

I’m not absolving Democrats either. I’m not saying Gavin Newsom didn’t promise a Marshall Plan 2.0 to me as we stood on McNally Avenue in Altadena on the Saturday after the fire started, and that hasn’t quite materialized, or that Karen Bass shouldn’t be criticized for being in Ghana and out of the country on a diplomatic mission for the Biden administration, despite the fact some of the people that she worked for knew how devastating the storm could be and it could turn into a firestorm. But to me, the most profound systemic breakdowns I’ve seen in the wake of the fire are the changes in the federal government, and how not using or having or being willing to accept the full information set at best, or operating on misinformation and disinformation at worst, has clearly affected the way that we will recover from this fire and subsequent disasters, which undoubtedly will be happening.

SAFIAN: Jacob’s frustration with the government response on all sides, it’s understandable given the devastation he witnessed. It also undercuts any lessons learned, but Jacob actually sees some silver linings in all this, some bigger implications to take away. We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, journalist Jacob Soboroff, author of the new book, Firestorm, took us back to the devastating LA wildfires of January 2025 and some of the miscues that followed. Now, we talk about longer term lessons and the implications beyond LA. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHow politics interferes with disaster response

Crises like this, you hope that we learn from them so that next time, things will be better. And what I’m hearing from you is that you’re not feeling like we’ve learned the right lessons, or even if we have, that maybe things aren’t better.

SOBOROFF: What I’ve learned is we have a major political problem with how we deal with natural disasters in this country. Democrats talk about these things like they’re a future threat only, and Republicans talk about them like they’re not happening or don’t, and the reality is we’re here and we’re living through them right now. People literally ran for their lives on Maui and dove into the Pacific Ocean to hide from firestorms. The campfire in Paradise, California, 85 people lost their lives. Just in recent years, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, the ice storms and the extreme heat in the south of the country, these things are happening and they’re happening every day, and these are scary times.

But I hope when people finish reading what it was like for me and so many other people to go through these Great Los Angeles Fires that will undoubtedly be repeated again, that there’s a lot to learn from the people who went through them. Not because anybody can stop these fires from happening or stop these natural disasters from happening, but I think we can learn from each other as human beings about compassion, about empathy. I think when I look back at the book now, I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through this year without doing this project and connecting with people and learning about what, in some measure, millions of us lived through here in LA and in the most populous county, LA County, in the country. As a kid growing up here, you train for what to do when the big one, the earthquake strikes, and in a way, we had it with this fire. And I hope while we can’t prevent them from happening, we’ll be more prepared if something like this happens again.

Copy LinkThe evolving role of information during emergencies

SAFIAN: You’ve mentioned a couple of times the politics and the way information flowed. It used to be when a disaster strikes, people would turn on the radio or the TV and get the official updates, and that didn’t quite happen. I know we did an episode with the founder of Watch Duty, which is this app that became this go-to source of information for–

SOBOROFF: Oh, for my own family. Just to – sorry to interrupt you, but just hearing you say that brings back so many visceral memories of my friends and family. A lot of the way that people found out about what was going on is that people were on family text chats or people were on apps. When I was in Ukraine, people found out about missiles, ballistic missiles using the same type of technology, open source information developed by young people to alert people to incoming threats. And that is a commentary on the preparation, the ability for our local governments to be ready for something like this, certainly whether or not they were ready for this one, and I think undeniably they weren’t. Because when you look at West Altadena where most of the people died in Altadena, those alerts didn’t reach so many of those people, and I think the same can be said for so many of the people who perished, of the 31 people who perished in these fires.

And you’ll read the story of Nick Schuler from Cal Fire, the State Firefighting Agency, in the book who said to me, “This was the one time I thought to myself, I’m going to probably get cancer from being in this fire and fighting this fire, because of the things that we’re breathing in and because of the places we have to be in order to try to stop this inferno.” And yeah, is there a way for those things not to happen? And just to bring it back to the hopeful side, I think that there is. I flew with NASA in the wake of these fires and watched them use this AVIRIS imaging spectrometry technology to fight fires from the sky, and in some measure, are the firefighters of the future NASA scientists using technology like that in order to help better direct people on the ground? I don’t know all the answers, but I do know that there was a whole world that I didn’t know or understand until I started to dig in for the book.

SAFIAN: There were so many hopeful stories and heroics really, and yet at the same time, it sounds like you also are saying that this immediately became politicized. It’s like the way everything else happens in our culture, that it wasn’t necessarily about what was happening on the ground and all those folks who were in harm’s way, but everything became politicized on all sides very quickly.

SOBOROFF: I will not forget getting the texts from Katie Miller asking me to go check Steven Miller’s parents’ house, and within, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say minutes, but maybe it was a couple of hours, Donald Trump tweeting conspiracy theories about the causes of the fire. And at the same time, one of his senior-most advisor’s parents’ house was likely burning down in flames, and they had asked me, a journalist, to go look and check and see if the house was still there and standing. He’s spreading lies, which by the way, are devastating to people on the ground and confusing to people on the ground. Even Gavin Newsom told me, people who he knew and trusted were calling him based on what was coming out of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and saying, “This is your fault, isn’t it? The things that you have done have led to this fire.”

And all of that, there’s a time and a place for asking.  I’m an investigative journalist. There’s a time and a place for asking those questions, but to your point, in the immediate moments of when the fire is still burning, it was not only unhelpful, but I think it was dangerous.

Copy LinkExamining the “chain reaction of events” after the fires

SAFIAN: LA is prone to droughts and wildfires and mudslides and earthquakes, and there’s also this Hollywood-ization of LA life that can impact national sentiment towards the city’s troubles. How has social and political empathy, or the lack of it, played out toward LA over the past year?

SOBOROFF: I actually think that this has been an incredible year for LA. We went from the costliest wildfire event in American history that killed 31 people and destroyed thousands and thousands upon thousands of homes to mass federal agents marauding through the streets and picking up our fellow Angelinos who were engaging in wildfire recovery, day laborers and undocumented workers who were central to the effort to both clean up and rebuild in the aftermath of the fire. And I think it was a gut punch for me to cover them back to back, but for anybody to experience them, and not to mention the people who are in the crosshairs of the federal agents.

And I do actually think that it created an extraordinary chain reaction of events where, as Los Angeles goes, so went the rest of the nation in terms of standing up and pushing back on some of the excesses and the abuses of power that we saw coming out of Washington, and I do think it let people look at Los Angeles in a slightly different way, in a less Hollywood way, in a less sensationalized way. There are millions upon millions of real working class people who work in one of the most unaffordable cities in the country. I always say that disasters like this provide us all a real x-ray vision to look at the fissures within our society, and I do think that the fires, back to back with what happened here over the summer with the ICE raids, provided people the opportunity to look at LA and say, “Okay, wait a minute, what’s happening there?”

SAFIAN: The fires are a business story in many ways. Businesses burned out, real estate, insurance, insurers talk about backing out of the entire state of California. Are there business implications from the fires that you see that are clear?

SOBOROFF: This is one of the most unaffordable cities in the country. The gap between the rich and the poor here is as great in this state as it is anywhere in our nation, and there are so many people who rely on these communities that don’t lay their head in these communities at night. And these businesses closing in these places where people with disposable income would go and spend money is devastating to the working class population in Los Angeles, obviously to the people who employ them as well and those businesses too. And I think that there’s a long way to go, and we have huge global events coming to Los Angeles.

Gavin Newsom assures me that the World Cup and the Super Bowl and the Olympics, all of which are coming to Los Angeles in the next several years, will go on without a hitch and will stimulate the local economy, but you have had two major neighborhoods in one of the great cities of the world literally wiped off the map, and it is a full scramble to get them back up and running, whether it’s businesses or people can afford to remain there, remain open, stay in those communities. I don’t think we’re going to know the answer to that for probably another decade, if not a generation or so.

SAFIAN: As we look forward from the LA fires, what’s at stake? What do Americans, what do those who listen to this show need to know about the risks we all face from increasing disasters and how we respond to them?

SOBOROFF: That the fires of the future, the Great Los Angeles Fires, it’s not some farfetched fantasy scenario or dystopian movie. It’s here now. It’s happened already, I witnessed it happen with my own eyes, and it will undoubtedly happen again in a community near you or your very own community. And until we understand that and think that we can beat back nature, that we can encroach on it more and more, that politics isn’t harmful and it doesn’t play a toxic role in the way that we address these disasters, we’re all going to suffer. And if we can center the fact that this is happening, that we put ourselves in this situation, and that if we think about who does get left behind, who wins, who loses? I think we can start to plan for these things better.

We can’t prevent them, but we can understand what they are and who suffers the most and how to be in community with one another when something like this strikes. That’s what I’ve taken away from this, that this is all going to be unavoidable, that our kids are going to see a lot more of this unfortunately, but that there are ways to go through this together that don’t feel so isolating, require so much grief and so much destruction like what we saw here.

SAFIAN: Well, Jacob, this was great. Thanks so much for talking to me about it.

SOBOROFF: Bob, I really appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.

SAFIAN: When disaster strikes, I always like to think that there will be a silver lining, that we’ll learn some lessons despite the costs, that will get some progress out of it. What Jacob’s reporting shows is that progress like that isn’t inevitable in any part of life, from natural disasters to business disasters, that we have to be intentional in applying our learnings and be brave enough to face our frailties and missteps. Our human vices, anger, guilt, opportunism, can get in the way of all that, but if we can find a way around those impulses and lean into empathy and openness, that’s the route to improvement that really matters. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.