Bringing Personal Perspective to Disaster

 

BookShelf: Bringing Personal Perspective to Disaster

“Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster”
By Jacob Soboroff
Mariner Books, $30.00

Reviewed by Jennifer Weeks

On a camping trip at the end of December 2024, MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff told a friend, “The last thing I want to be doing is covering a fire. In that ridiculous yellow outfit? Absolutely no way.”

Soboroff had been covering border issues, including the Trump administration’s family separation policy. But he was starting a new assignment as part of an NBC team in Los Angeles — not by his choice.

A week later, large chunks of Los Angeles, including the Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities, went up in flames.

A “very strong, widespread, and destructive windstorm,” as the National Weather Service described it, hit Los Angeles and Ventura counties on Jan. 7, 2025, with gusts of 80 miles per hour or more. 

With conditions extremely dry, the stage was set for “very large fires with very rapid fire spread,” the agency warned.

The forecast was accurate. The Eaton (Altadena) and Palisades wildfires burned more than 37,000 acres, destroyed more than 16,000 homes and caused billions of dollars in damages. 

Through March 2026, insurers had paid out more than $23 billion in claims. In spite of his ultimatum about covering fires, Soboroff had grown up in Pacific Palisades and recognized that he could bring a personal perspective to NBC’s coverage. 

 

He spent the next several weeks

reporting live from charred streets,

sometimes with live flames

in the background.

 

He spent the next several weeks reporting live on MSNBC and NBC from charred streets, sometimes with live flames in the background, wearing a yellow fire jacket and goggles over his glasses to protect his eyes from smoke.

Soboroff frames this book as an account of what it was like to see familiar sites, including his childhood home, torched. 

“I am a journalist guided by a simple principle,” he writes. “Report the facts on the ground as I always have done. To tell you, as I always endeavor to do, what I saw, who I met, and what I learned during and after the Great Los Angeles Fires about America’s New Age of Disaster.”

The strongest parts of the book are Soboroff’s street-level descriptions of chasing the fast-developing story — driving through the burning neighborhoods, steering around debris and avoiding downed power lines — while trying his best to let friends and relatives know whether their homes were still standing. 

“It felt as though a tropical storm or hurricane was blowing through our coastal California community, with scalding embers playing the part of pelting rain,” he writes.

Soboroff points out some less-evident impacts, such as the fact that thousands of people who lived in other neighborhoods worked in Palisades’ homes, restaurants and businesses. The fires disrupted their lives, as well as those of residents. 

He finds some signs of hope, such as the quick return of wild parakeets to smoldering neighborhoods. And he shows how hard firefighters worked to contain the blazes, even as their water pressure dropped to zero in some locations.

 

Soboroff touches on climate change,

development, emergency management,

federal budget cuts and other factors that

contributed to the firestorm and its effects.

 

The narrative also shifts into analysis periodically. These sections are weaker. Soboroff touches on climate change, development, emergency management, federal budget cuts and other factors that contributed to the firestorm and its effects. But these digressions feel thinner and less-developed than the central story of reporting on the fires.

Soboroff describes, appropriately, how Donald Trump, then-president-elect, politicized the fires and repeatedly blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for allegedly fumbling the disaster. However, Soboroff also provides a multipage account of Trump’s postfire visit to Los Angeles that’s clearly based on an extended interview with Newsom: 

“Okay, this is all part of the schtick, but I’m fine [Newsom thought]. Like, this is good. We need to do this. … It’s about the goddamn president and the governor of California and people that are literally in need, suffering, and they need to see us get along.” 

Trump’s statements and actions are damning enough without turning the narrative over to Newsom.

In his epilogue, Soboroff veers to Morgantown, West Virginia, where he reports three months after the fires on Trump administration layoffs at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, including some researchers who study firefighter safety. It’s a valid point, but an odd way to end a book about a cataclysm in California.

“Firestorm” will be of special interest to environmental journalists who, like Soboroff, have covered disasters on their home turf. It could have been stronger if it had been written as either a memoir or an analysis, instead of trying to do both.

Jennifer Weeks, an SEJournal contributing editor, is a freelance editor, writer and a former Society of Environmental Journalists board member. She was senior environment and energy editor at The Conversation US from 2015 to 2024. Her last review was of “The Return of the Oystercatcher: Saving Birds to Save the Planet."

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 36. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.