Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster

Summary

A “gripping, unshakeable firsthand account” (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the reporter who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native.

On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. “Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating,” his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind his home. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief. “I should go. I grew up in the Palisades.”

Soon he was on the front line of the blaze—his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction, from both the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, in Altadena. In the days to come, Soboroff appeared across the networks of NBC News as Los Angeles was ablaze, met with displaced residents and workers, and interviews Governor Gavin Newsom on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff had previously covered at home or abroad could prepare him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground.

But for Soboroff, questions remained. How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? This set Soboroff off on months of reporting—with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, meteorologists and more—that made him keenly aware that the 2025 Los Angeles fires were not an isolated tragedy. They are a harbinger—”the fire of the future,” in the words of one senior emergency—management official.

Firestorm is the story of the costliest wildfire in American history, the people it affected, and the deeply personal connection to one journalist covering it. It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America’s new age of disaster we are living through portends that—without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned—there is more yet, and worse, to come.