A year after the Great L.A. Fires: Jacob Soboroff’s ‘Firestorm’

If journalism is the first draft of history, then television news is the rough, improbable sketch. As last year's wildfires multiplied and remained 0% contained, reporters on the ground tasked with laying out the unknown on camera mourned with Los Angeles in real time.

“What are you supposed to say when the entire community you were born and raised in is wiped out, literally burning to the ground before your eyes?” Jacob Soboroff writes at “Firestorm” will be released in early January on the eve of the first anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton fires. “I couldn't think of much.”

Viewers saw this fight on January 8, 2025. Soboroff, then a national correspondent for NBC News, briefly broke the fourth wall while trying to describe the destruction of his former hometown of Pacific Palisades.

“Firestorm” The first book about the Great Los Angeles Fire of 2025 takes readers inside Soboroff's reporter's notebook and the nearly two relentless weeks he spent covering the Palisades and the ensuing Eaton wildfire. “It turns out that fire can be a remarkable time machine,” he writes, “a curious form of teleportation into the past and future at the same time.”

The book claims that the long-predicted future arrived on the morning of January 7th. The costliest wildfire to date in American history was exacerbated by a cascade of misfortunes and misinformation in real time, ushering in what Soboroff calls “America's New Age of Disaster”: “Every aspect of my childhood flashed before my eyes, and although I'm not sure I realized it when I looked into the camera… I saw my children's future, too, or at least some version of it.”

At the end of December Soborov returned to Palisades Recreation Center for the first time since it burned down. Tennis balls flew from the courts on the cliff. Children screamed near ersatz police cars, ambulances and fire trucks on the playground – part public-private project worth US$30 million the redevelopment is supported, among others, by City Hall, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Lakers coach JJ Redick, among others.

The sun peeks through the morning sea as Soborov pauses at the plaque on the only standing structure, a New Deal-era basketball gym. His parents' names are engraved at the top; underneath them are family, friends, neighbors. This is practically a family tree in metal, dedicated to memory solo fundraising efforts his father, developer Steve Soboroff, to renovate a local playground. It also marked Soboroff Sr.'s entry into civilian life, the start of a career that later included 10 years as Los Angeles police commissioner, a mayoral bid and a 90-day stint as chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

“And it was because my father hit his head in that park,” Soboroff says with a grin, recalling the incident that launched his father’s public safety efforts.

He checks out the old office where he used to get basketballs as a kid. “What's going on? Are people still coming to the park?” he asks an amusement and parks employee, going into street-man mode.

Driving down Memory Lane (Sunset Boulevard), Soborov jokes that he can close his eyes and trace the street by touch. Past rows of yard signs—KAREN BASS LEAVE NOW—and tattered American flags, grass and rose bushes poke through the rubble. Pompeii on the Pacific Ocean.

On the corner where he once ran a lemonade stand, Soboroff FaceTimed his mother. national television to show her what was left of the house in which he was born. Before the fires, he had never turned the microphone on himself.

In the worst moments, when there was no one around but the roar of the firestorm, “I had to keep it inside,” he says. “It was a different assignment than I’ve ever had to do.”

Soborov is 42 years old, with a boyish look, with a mop of dark curls and round glasses, he feels equally comfortable both on the field and behind the presenter's console. J-school was never part of the plan. But he developed a taste for sensationalism as a confidant of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. MTV News once seemed like a dream, but he has always preferred the free-wheeling, fun talk of public television. Huell Houser. MSNBC took notice of his post-graduation videos on YouTube and HuffPost and hired him in 2015.

Ten years later, he grew tired of breaking news assignments and hid his “TV news cosplay gear” to ring in 2025. But when he saw the winds fanning the flames in the Palisades from the NBC bureau at Universal Studios, he fished out a yellow Nomex fire jacket and hopped into a three-ton white Jeep with his crew.

The first chapters of Firestorm read like a sci-fi thriller. Warnings, written in capital letters, ricochet between agencies. Columns of smoke appear. High wind warnings are increasing. Soboroff takes the reader from the Palisades fire station to the National Weather Service office, to a presidential hotel room, to downed power lines in Altadena, to helicopter tankers over leveled streets, and to Governor Newsom's emergency operations center.

Between filming live with producer Bianca Seward and cinematographers Jean Bernard Rutagarama and Alan Rice, Soboroff takes desperate calls from both loved ones and unexpected contacts desperate for a look at the ground. One from Katie Miller, a former White House aide who broke off contact after the reporter published “Separated,” his 2020 book about Trump's family separation policy. Miller, the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, asks him to check on her relatives' house. “You’re the only one I see who’s there,” she writes. Soborov confirms that the house no longer exists. “In my book, Palisades is stronger than politics,” he replies. For a moment, old differences disappear. It doesn't last long.

He returns home to Frogtown, changes into smoke-soaked clothes, and sleeps for a few hours before heading back. “Another big blow from the relentless roar of lights one after the other,” he writes. Fellow Palisadian and fellow MS Now member Katy Tur flies in to tour the “area of ​​our youth being burned.”

After the fires, Soboroff immediately began covering immigration raids in Los Angeles. However, he found it difficult to communicate with others. Maybe a little depressed. The book didn't take shape until April, after a conversation with Jonathan White, a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who is now running for Congress.

Fire, White tells him, has become the fastest-growing threat in America and, for many communities, the most immediate. Soboroff began tracking down the people he met during the fire—firefighters, scientists, local residents, federal officials—and churned out pages on weekends. It kept the book under strict control from January 7 to 24, culminating in President Trump's visit to the Palisades with Governor Newsom. He reserved investigative journalism and political finger-pointing for other writers.

“This is a much more personal book for me,” Soboroff says. “It's about experiencing what I came to understand as the fire of the future. It's not just about politics, it's about people.”

Looking back and learning from the lessons of the fire has been a form of liberation for both him and the city, he said. “What happened here is a lesson for everyone across the country.”

Rudy, a Los Angeles native, is a freelance arts and culture writer. She is working on her debut novel about a student journalist who stutters.