The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster - a correspondent’s account of the devastating 2025 fires

La Cañada Flintridge (LCF) ONE CITY, ONE BOOK selection is Firestorm by Jacob Soboroff

"Read[s] like a sci-fi thriller.” —Los Angeles Times

On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff. “Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating. Really bad.” Jacob rushed to the office of his 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 become 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 pressed Governor Gavin Newsom in an interview on Meet the Press. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad—the trauma of family separation at the border, the displacement of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of order in Haiti—could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground.

 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.

JACOB SOBOROFF is the MS Now Senior Political and National Reporter.

Soboroff is also the author of the NYT bestseller Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. For his reporting on the Trump administration’s child separation policy, he received the Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a National Journalist, and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. In 2024, he received a Yale University Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, and he was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy® Award for his reporting from Haiti. He lives in Los Angeles.