Firestorm

Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC, chronicles the catastrophic wildfires that struck Los Angeles County in January 2025, weaving his experience as a displaced Pacific Palisades native with the stories of firefighters, residents, scientists, and political leaders. The book is structured around the firefighting concepts of "initial attack," the first effort to contain a newly started fire, and "extended attack," the sustained response after initial containment fails, tracing events from the fires' origins through the political aftermath of what Soboroff calls America's New Age of Disaster.

Soboroff opens by explaining that in mid-December 2024, he was reluctantly reassigned from long-form feature journalism to day-to-day coverage at NBC's Los Angeles bureau, despite having told friends he never wanted to cover fires. That reassignment placed him at his desk on January 7, 2025, the day the Palisades Fire erupted in the neighborhood where he grew up.

The fire's origins trace to a small New Year's Day blaze called the Lachman Fire, allegedly set by an arsonist in the Santa Monica Mountains. Federal prosecutors allege that an ember ignited underground roots, which smoldered undetected for six days. Firefighter Eric Mendoza of Engine Company No. 69, the station serving Pacific Palisades, had fought the Lachman Fire and taken six days off. On January 7, his first day back, Captain Jeff Brown spotted smoke from the same ridgeline and mobilized the company before any dispatch call came in.

Four days earlier, David Gomberg, a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service, had identified alarming wind, humidity, and fuel moisture data. By January 6, he transmitted a "particularly dangerous situation" alert, a designation reserved for the most extreme forecasts, warning of gusts up to 100 miles per hour and single-digit humidity across hillsides covered in chaparral, the dense, drought-adapted shrubland native to Southern California. Mayor Karen Bass was out of the country in Ghana.

On January 7, Soboroff sat at his desk oblivious to the fire until his brother Miles texted the family group chat: "Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating." Miles and his pregnant wife, Shana, were fleeing the home where Soboroff had been born, which the couple had been living in. Governor Gavin Newsom, stranded in the desert after President Biden's Coachella Valley trip was canceled, drove to the Palisades to see the fire himself.

The firefighters of Station 69 raced from the beach to the Palisades Highlands and began protecting structures. They initially believed they had beaten back the flames, but a radio call reported buildings burning on the far side of the canyon. Mendoza called his daughters to say he loved them; it was the last they heard from him for days.

By early afternoon, the fire had consumed over 200 acres, generating showers of airborne embers that ignited spot fires miles downwind. Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) Chief Kristin Crowley pleaded for mutual-aid resources from neighboring counties, a system through which jurisdictions share firefighting assets, reporting homes burning and people trapped. Broadcasts showed residents abandoning gridlocked cars to flee on foot.

Soboroff departed with producer Bianca Seward and a camera crew, beginning live reports around 4:45 p.m. from the Palisades Riviera, where the ridge of Will Rogers State Historic Park was engulfed. He appeared on multiple MSNBC programs through the evening. LAFD chief pilot Dan Child grounded all aircraft around 7:30 p.m. after gusts reached 89 miles per hour, making water drops impossible. On the ground, Mendoza abandoned his fire engine on Sunset Boulevard and led his crew to El Medio Avenue, where they lay flat in the street battling flames for hours as temperatures exceeded 1,000 degrees.

Around 6:10 p.m., a second fire ignited near Eaton Canyon in Altadena, on the opposite side of the county. One theory under investigation holds that hurricane-force gusts transferred electricity from active power lines to a century-old idle transmission line owned by Southern California Edison, sparking vegetation at the tower's base. US Forest Service Fire Chief Robert Garcia recognized the location as near where the devastating 1993 Kinneloa Fire had started and mobilized regional resources.

Overnight, both fires raged uncontrolled. The Eaton Fire command post relocated twice before settling at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Newsom secured a Fire Management Assistance Grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and arranged to hand-deliver a disaster declaration request to Biden the next morning. On McNally Avenue in Altadena, Cate Heneghan, a senior engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stayed until 2:30 a.m. before recognizing toxic chemicals in the smoke and fleeing. Herb and Loyda Wilson, longtime McNally residents vacationing in Hawaii, learned their daughter Ashley had evacuated.

Around 1 a.m. on January 8, Soboroff returned home briefly, then drove back to the Palisades by 2:30 a.m. He found complete devastation: Every house on the Alphabet Streets, a neighborhood of letter-named roads, was gone, and the century-old Palisades Business Block was burning. He jogged uphill to find his brother's home still standing, though the house across the street was engulfed.

That morning, Katie Miller, wife of Trump aide Stephen Miller, called Soboroff and asked him to check on Miller's parents' Palisades home. He found nothing left. Shortly afterward, Trump posted his first message about the fires, blaming Newsom for refusing to sign a nonexistent "water restoration declaration" to protect "an essentially worthless fish called a smelt." Elon Musk amplified the post to hundreds of millions of followers. Soboroff then drove to his childhood home on Frontera Drive and found it destroyed. He FaceTimed his mother, who responded: "Every one of you was born in that house."

Biden arrived at a Santa Monica fire station, where Newsom handed him the disaster declaration. Biden signed it, promising 100 percent federal reimbursement for 180 days. Within minutes, Trump posted: "NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA." A third fire, the Sunset Fire, erupted that evening in the Hollywood Hills.

Over the following days, Soboroff returned to the Palisades with his childhood friend Katy Tur, an MSNBC anchor and fellow Palisades native, and heard the call of nanday parakeets, wild birds descended from those released from private aviaries during the 1961 Bel Air Fire. On Friday, January 10, Mendoza collapsed at home after three continuous days of fighting, his blood oxygen dangerously low. Soboroff interviewed Newsom for Meet the Press on McNally Avenue, where Newsom announced executive orders suspending environmental regulations to fast-track rebuilding and outlined a "Marshall Plan" for the region. In Altadena, Soboroff reported on devastated small businesses and day laborers organizing cleanup for displaced neighbors. On January 16, LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told displaced residents the fires were a "community conflagration" comparable to the 2023 Lahaina fire in Maui and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, driven by winds no force could overcome. He called for fire-resistant construction, defensible space (cleared zones around structures to slow fire spread), and restoring natural fire cycles.

In the epilogue, Soboroff traces broader implications. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) 2024 analysis counted 27 billion-dollar weather disasters, nearly matching the 2023 record of 28. In March 2025, the Trump administration instructed lead scientist Adam Smith to stop updating the 40-year disaster database; Smith resigned, telling Soboroff the elimination "creates a kind of a vacuum in knowledge." Captain Jonathan White of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a disaster recovery specialist, identifies four forces behind the fires: the global climate emergency, infrastructure disintegration, changes in how people live, and the politics of disinformation. White calls the LA fires 'a sentinel event'—a critical warning signal demanding systemic investigation and reform—giant but addressable.

Trump's Department of Government Efficiency directly impaired fire response: The Forest Service could not hire firefighters, potential NASA cuts threatened wildfire research, FEMA lost senior officials, and the National Weather Service lost 1,000 employees. Trump visited Los Angeles in late January and shook hands with Newsom despite weeks of attacks, but continued insisting on his debunked water theory. The Army Corps of Engineers subsequently released over 2 billion gallons of water into Central Valley fields that did not need it.

As of early fall 2025, 31 people had died, nearly 40,000 acres had burned, and over 16,000 structures had been destroyed, with just over 1,000 building permits issued. The Wilsons intended to rebuild on McNally Avenue. Firefighters including Mendoza remained on duty, some undergoing cancer screening. Soboroff's father was named chief recovery officer for the Palisades rebuild. Captain White and Jake Levine, a White House climate aide whose family's Palisades home burned, both declared runs for Congress. Soboroff concludes that hope in America's New Age of Disaster lies not in politics but in people: day laborers rallying against deportation, scientists studying fires despite funding threats, and public health workers protesting cuts to safety research.