Investigating The Great Los Angeles Fires

Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours, in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. On New Year's Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he said something that would soon come back to haunt him. The last thing I want to be doing, he said, is covering a fire, and that ridiculous yellow outfit, absolutely no way.

Just one week later, Jacob was standing on a street corner in Los Angeles. in that yellow outfit, reporting live as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised. It's hard to fathom the scale of the devastation that followed. 31 people were killed, 16,000 structures were destroyed, nearly 40,000 acres burned, an area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, making the Los Angeles fires among the most destructive wildfire events in American history. Jacob Sobaroff was there for all of it and has written about it in a new book called Firestorm, The Great Los Angeles Fires, and America's New Age of Disaster.

It's a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists, and political leaders, and it's also an investigation into why it happened and why experts agree it will likely happen again. Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS Now, formerly MSNBC, where he covers immigration, inequality, and national politics. His first book, Separated, Inside an American Tragedy, documented the Trump administration's family separation policy at the border. Jacob Soboroff, welcome back to Fresh Air. Tanya, thank you so much for having me back.

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