We speak with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book and ongoing reporting about the Los Angeles fires one year ago, when destructive infernos razed entire neighborhoods, killing 30 people and displacing over 100,000 more. The book Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster provides a detailed look at how the fires unfolded, the emergency efforts and the political response. Soboroff, who grew up in the area, describes seeing the charred remains of his own childhood home while misinformation from Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other powerful figures was “pouring rhetorical fuel on the flames of the very real fire.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
One year ago today, the historic Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire started in Los Angeles, California, burning a massive path of destruction through the region. More than 30 people died, over 100,000 displaced. Some 16,000 buildings and homes were destroyed.
As the fires burned, then-MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff was on the ground reporting about the neighborhood where he grew up. This is an excerpt from a report he filed after discovering the home he was born in had burned down.
JACOB SOBOROFF: This is the first time that I’ve seen the house that I grew up in, and I don’t really know what to say.
Mom? Look at this.
PATTI SOBOROFF: Is that Frontera?
JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah.
PATTI SOBOROFF: Our — your birth house?
JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah.
PATTI SOBOROFF: Oh, I’m so sad. Every one of you guys was born in that house.
JACOB SOBOROFF: I know. It makes me — it makes me sad, too.
This was a really, really special place for the Soboroff family, and I’m very sorry to see it go. And I’m very sorry for all of the residents of Pacific Palisades and everyone across the greater L.A. area that’s going through this right now.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jacob Soboroff reporting a year ago. As recovery from the fires continues, Jacob joins us now to discuss his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster. We also had him in to talk about his other book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. Jacob is a senior political and national reporter for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
JACOB SOBOROFF: It’s so good to see you, Amy. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to see you. A year ago today, you were reporting somewhere, and you get a call from your brother.
JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah. My brother says, “There’s a huge fire in the Palisades.” It was actually on a text thread to our whole family. “We’re evacuating right now.” And he had lived not far from where I grew up for most of my life, up in the Santa Monica Mountains, until I was about 18 years old. They left. The home they lived in ultimately burned down. The childhood home that I lived in had burned down, and was born into.
You know, and I think, as you cover these things in real time, how do you process watching your childhood memories carbonize in front of your eyeballs? And I didn’t. I mean, the answer is, you don’t. You can’t, especially while talking to a national television audience. And so I wanted to do this book. I wanted to do Firestorm to understand what it was. How did we get here? Is it going to happen again? And the answer is, yes, definitely. This was the fire of the future, and I experienced it in real time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jacob, can you talk about the causes of the fire, and the subsequent defunding of agencies like FEMA and NOAA and the key agencies that can alert the public about these disasters?
JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah, Juan. The thing about this book is that you’re going to read — you know, it’s a minute-by-minute accounting of what really went on. It reads like a sci-fi thriller, but it’s just the truth. It’s what we’re going to experience more and more. And part of that story is not just the personal nature of this and how devastating it was to everybody, but what has happened in the aftermath.
And you are going to read, from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., stories of government officials telling me, both in their official capacity and outside the official channels, because they weren’t authorized to speak, about the devastation that this particular administration — Trump was president-elect at the time, and it didn’t stop him from spreading misinformation and disinformation — but how they have decimated FEMA. Senior leaders have left. The National Weather Service, that predicted this event as a particularly dangerous situation, has lost meteorologists all around the country. NIOSH, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has lost people that look out for the well-being of firefighters after things like this. NASA’s Earth science program is on the chopping block, and I flew with FireSense — their mission, to study the future of fire and to map it using imaging spectrometry from the sky to make it easier to fight fires on the ground. I was in the Pacific Northwest, all for this book, with the Forest Service, who could not actually bring on firefighters at the beginning of this administration because of the DOGE cuts and the hiring freezes that were taking place.
And so, when you look at the fire of the future, it’s a confluence of many things: obviously, the global climate emergency, which you will read about in detail in the book, but also our infrastructure falling apart — the Altadena Fire was a steel lattice tower that was not even active and had been sitting dormant for years, that became electrified; changes in the way we live — electric car batteries exploding, a thousand of them, all over Los Angeles, one emergency management official told me; and then, finally, again, this issue of misinformation and disinformation during national natural disasters, the kind of which Donald Trump was spreading, saying things like we could just turn on a tap and have water flow down from the Pacific Northwest. I laugh, but it’s preposterous. It is ridiculous. And those are the kinds of things today, in this new age of disaster in America, that Americans are contending with, in addition to the climate emergency.
AMY GOODMAN: Jacob, you have a fascinating story about Katie Miller —
JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — getting in touch with you to see about her in-laws’ home — Katie Miller married to Stephen Miller, talking about his parents’ home — and your relationship with her since Separated, in your reporting on immigrants.
JACOB SOBOROFF: I couldn’t believe it, Amy. Katie Miller was the person, as the junior-most press deputy to Kirstjen Nielsen in the Department of Homeland Security, that invited me into the facilities to see family separations for myself. She didn’t like the book, I think it’s fair to say, and my reporting about family separation, so we had lost touch.
But as I stood there getting ready to deliver a special report for Lester Holt on NBC News, my phone rang, and it was Katie Miller. And I said I couldn’t speak, so I hung up. But before I could even call her back, she texted me and basically asked me to go check on Stephen Miller’s parents’ house in the Palisades. You can imagine my surprise. I said, “Am I really being asked to go to Stephen Miller’s parents’ house?” Well, just like I did for my friends that I drove in high school and my brother and other people I knew in the Palisades, I went and checked. They had lost their home.
And for a second, maybe foolishly, I thought, you know, this adversarial journalist-source relationship, the politics of the past, could be put aside. But within minutes, maybe even before she had texted me, Donald Trump and Elon Musk both, her future boss at DOGE, were spreading — pouring rhetorical fuel on the flames of the very real fire. And it was very clear to me very quickly that while I had gone and done this — and I don’t deserve any credit, it was what anybody would have done — her own bosses were making the recovery and the fire itself worse for people like her own in-laws.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about what’s happening to people —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And talk about how Governor Gavin Newsom —
JACOB SOBOROFF: Go ahead, Juan.
AMY GOODMAN: We had the same question, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m sorry. Yeah, I’m sorry. Describe how Governor Newsom handled this fire, as President Trump and Musk, the others attacked him online.
JACOB SOBOROFF: You know, a lot of people have been making a lot of his current social media strategy to punch back against Donald Trump in a way equally hard that Donald Trump punches at him. And you will read about the origin story of that strategy, actually, in Firestorm.
There is an incredible scene where he is sitting in his makeshift command center in Los Angeles, watching Elon Musk during a live stream prod, I think it’s fair to say, local firefighters on the ground about conspiracy theories related to why there was no water in the hydrants. And there are legitimate questions to ask about — you know, infrastructure-related questions about why a 117 million-gallon reservoir in the Palisades was empty at the time of the fire. And Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass and the Democratic leaders, you know, are not absolved in any of this, either. But Elon Musk is there pushing these firefighters, that are essentially saying to him, “Look, we were flowing so much water, it’s like turning on all the taps in your house at the same time.” This is what I heard from lots of firefighters. “How can you possibly expect water pressure to remain consistent when you have three times the size of Manhattan burning in Los Angeles right now?”
Well, Musk seemed flustered during that exchange, and Gavin Newsom was watching it live. And he said to his aides, in some pretty salty and colorful language, which you can read about in the book, “Clip that right now. F— these guys. We’re going to go back on the attack immediately.” And that’s exactly what Gavin Newsom did. They put that clip on the internet. And he said that was the beginning of the way that he has started to deal with the misinformation and disinformation now.
I spent a lot of time with him for this book, and I think you’re going to be surprised by what — that picture on the right-hand side of the screen is me and him in Altadena, days after the fire, with the National Guard troops, which, by the way, he’s still dealing with the ramifications of that. He’s trying to get the — he just got the control of the Guard back, and he expects Trump to take it again.
AMY GOODMAN: And the migrant workers who tried to clean up the fire being targeted by the Trump administration now?
JACOB SOBOROFF: He said to me on that very day, in that photo, off camera, after I interviewed him for Meet the Press, “I’m really concerned about what Trump, the president-elect, is going to do with immigration and its impact on the recovery.” We got more undocumented people in L.A. than any other city in the country. I think it’s 10% of the population. They are the prime target, standing in Home Depot parking lots. Not the worst of the worst, but the people that are engaged in the rebuilding of Los Angeles are the ones being targeted by the ICE raids right now. We’ve seen people run and die, getting hit by cars on freeways by these operations. You know what they’re doing? They’re trying to find work rebuilding homes in Altadena and the Palisades. That’s who the Trump administration is targeting, as Gavin Newsom points out.
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds. People losing their homes, their property, they already had their houses burn down.
JACOB SOBOROFF: Well, and here’s the thing: 40% of the homes and the lots that are selling now are going to corporate investors, not locals. L.A. is the most unaffordable city in the country, in the most unaffordable state in the union. This book will show you the fissures that lie beneath our society that are exposed when a firestorm like this happens.
AMY GOODMAN: Jacob Soboroff, senior political and national reporter for MS NOW, new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster.
On Monday, we’ll speak with filmmaker Ondi Timoner about her film, All the Walls Came Down, about losing her home. We’ll also speak with the main protagonist, the community activist in Altadena, Heavenly Hughes. That does it for our show. The film has been shortlisted for an Oscar. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
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