One year later, 'Firestorm' investigates the systems that failed during the LA Fires

On New Year's Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he made an offhand comment that would come back to haunt him: The last thing he wanted to do in the new year, Soboroff said, was cover a story that would require donning a fire-safe yellow suit.

Just one week later, Soboroff was dressed in the yellow suit, reporting live from a street corner in Los Angeles as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.

"This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed," Soboroff says of the neighborhood. "Every hallmark of my childhood I was watching carbonize in front of me. … There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there, but it was an extremely lonely isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time."

The Palisades and Eaton fires burned out of control for days, destroying more than 16,000 structures and killing at least 31 people. At the time, then President-elect Trump falsely blamed the city of Los Angeles for not having enough water to fight the blazes.

"The misinformation and disinformation that was coming from the president-elect and the people around him made fighting these fires, if not more specifically difficult in real time, more traumatic for the people that were searching for answers," Soboroff says.

In his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster, Soboroff offers a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe, told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists and political leaders. He says covering the wildfires was the most important assignment he's ever undertaken.

"The experience of doing this is something that I don't wish on anybody, but in a way I wish everybody could experience," he says. "It's given me insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. ... It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else."

I'm not trying to absolve the Department of Water and Power in the city or any of these municipal entities from answering real questions over time about could there have been higher water pressure, but what firefighters said to me at the time ... [was] it's like being in your house and turning all the taps on at the same time and expecting your water pressure to remain the same. It's just not possible. And so every hydrant virtually is open in both of these neighborhoods at the same time — different water systems, but the same issue: low to no pressure.

This is why the Eaton Fire happened. The prevailing theory at least, is that dormant electrical lines that stretch up and over Eaton Canyon … were electrified in the windstorm ahead of the fire breaking out in Altadena. And as soon as that spark happened .... everything exploded. And so the question is there: Should these big steel lattice towers that have been dormant for decades have been there? Why wasn't the power shut off entirely in these super high-voltage power lines? Again, would it have stopped the scale of the fire if even that was different?

I don't think we know the answer. Remember, the Palisades Fire was a holdover fire from an earlier fire, the Lachman Fire, which was started by an arsonist seven days prior. And the underground root system of that fire was still burning. I knew nothing about it before I started researching this book and talking to experts. … "Firebrands" is what they're called, and they just sit there, these embers, and all it needed, it waited for the wind to blow the thin layer of dirt in the Santa Monica Mountains off the top of it for those embers to make contact with the remaining vegetation that was there.

It was the thing that the firefighters from the Los Angeles County Fire Department over in Altadena told me, and I was fascinated to hear, is that during the Palisades Fire, but before the Eaton Fire had broken out, the thing they were getting called for the most was downed power lines in residential neighborhoods. There are so many above-ground power lines, utility poles all throughout Los Angeles county. It's the way they used to do it. It's a huge investment, obviously, but there's no question today that undergrounding of those utilities would prevent similar disasters or at least sparks that could lead to similar disasters in the future.

These types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. ...

Pablo Alvarado in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said to me that often the first people into a disaster, the second responders after the first are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina, and they'd be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time. And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin … on the streets of LA as sort of the petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country. And it's not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots where workers looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign.

They both look like very big construction sites in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings and the Palisades. There's a central business district. The building was 100 years old when the fire hit and the outside of it is still standing. But mostly it's just empty lots, and in Altadena, the same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside is still there. But it's a patchwork of empty lots. Homes now under construction. And lots and lots of workers. ... There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena, but for the most part, these are communities where you've got workers going in during the day and coming out at night.

We have designed this community to be one that's in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody's packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. People may not return to their communities after they've lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the wildland urban interface in the second largest city in the country.

Anna Bauman and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.