Loading summary
Transcript65 lines
- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today, the lasting impact of the Los Angeles fires. On January 7th of 2025, Los Angeles county experienced the most destructive series of fires it had ever seen.
- [00:30]
B
You know, I can close my eyes and rem what it felt like to see embers falling like rain, sometimes horizontally in all directions.
- [00:38]
A
That's Jacob Soboroff, a senior reporter at Ms. Now in Los Angeles. He was working that day at the NBC studio when the fires broke out. Jacob grew up in the Palisades, and when he heard that the neighborhood was ablaze, he set out to cover the fires there.
- [00:54]
B
I looked over at Will Rogers State Historic park and knew that over that ridge, my entire childhood was on fire.
- [01:02]
A
Jacob spent the next several days on the ground, reporting live on the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire. Together they burned for over three weeks and decimated over 16,000 homes and buildings, including the home where Jacob grew up. 31 people died from their injuries, and hundreds more deaths are being attributed to smoke inhalation and other conditions. Now Jacob is out with a new book called the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster. It's a harrowing real time account of what happened, why fires like this are likely to keep happening, and why just over a year later, the work of recovery is far from over.
- [01:45]
B
I think that there is a profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on. What was lost is incalculable. You know, two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone.
- [01:58]
A
I started by asking Jacob how these two fires began.
- [02:04]
B
The Palisades fire was a rekindling of another fire called the Lockman fire, which allegedly, according to federal prosecutors, was started by an arsonist. And the root system of some of the native vegetation in the mountains of the Santa Monica Mountains remained ablaze, for lack of a better term, when these hurricane force Santa Ana winds started blowing through Los Angeles and it had not rained virtually the entire rainy season in Southern California. And that fire reignited. And by that night, on the entirely opposite side of Los Angeles county because of faulty electrical equipment, is the prevailing theory, the Eden Fire also began and led to a whole other series of devastating incidents on literally the polar opposite sides of Los Angeles. And by the way, the National Weather service, these meteorologists, two of whom I spent a lot of time with, Dr. Ariel Cohn and Dave Gomberg, warned literally about this exact situation unfolding. They issued what was known as a particularly dangerous situation warning that went out to all the Local fire departments and local officials, elected officials, emergency managers, that said if there is an ignition that there could be catastrophic, will likely be catastrophic consequences.
- [03:18]
A
Yeah. You spoke to lots of families who, who were evacuated, who were at risk of losing their homes, who, who didn't know what the next day or in the day after that would look like. How would you describe communication for people on the ground who were actually in what were considered dangerous zones?
- [03:37]
B
I mean, I can tell you first about my own family's communication is that it was a group text and that I think is how we all first sort of understood what was going on. My brother wrote big fire in the Palisades, we're evacuating and sent a couple of pictures to our thread. And when you talk to other people who lived in either of the communities, text is how everybody was communicating initially. And I think that there's some great reporting about how the emergency alert system wasn't functioning properly for everybody to get those evacuation alerts. And I think this, not to absolve anybody, but I think that this was happening so quickly that it was hard for the systems themselves to keep up. So I think that people first and foremost were relying on what they were seeing on television. Local news did, I mean, I think definitionally a public service in being on the air literally for days straight without commercial interruption in order to tell people where they were seeing fire and what was happening. But it was too late for so many people. I will never forget the scenes that I saw even before I was able to get out to the fire, sitting at my desk in the LA bureau of NBC News of people abandoning their cars in the middle of the street, literally running for their lives because this all unfolded so, so quickly. And so I think, you know, it was word of mouth initially. And I think that when people look back today, that's why so many people say, why? Why couldn't this have been stopped before? If this was going to be so out of control, why weren't there better warnings? Why weren't there more fire trucks pre positioned?
- [05:02]
A
Yeah, I remember hearing from friends in the area that they felt their best source of information at the time was an app.
- [05:09]
B
Yep. Watch Duty was one that people were using. Genesis Protect is another.
- [05:12]
A
I mean, what was the official guidance that people were getting from government and when did it come and what did people make of it? I mean, what were the sort of kind of official channels of communication?
- [05:25]
B
I guess the real question is if they got it, you know, and did they get it during the Eaton fire? Reporting indicates that those alerts never reached those people. I think that the reality is, as you talk to people in all parts of Los Angeles, they felt like there was no consistency to the warnings or there was not one way to get these alerts. And it was a scramble, that's the truth. Despite the fact that local leaders and certainly emergency managers were issuing updates and telling people to get out. I mean, literally the entire Palisades was evacuated. Tens of thousands of people, which is what led to the crush of humanity on the streets. Bulldozers having to push aside cars to get people out down to Pacific coast highway, literally to get to the ocean in order to try to avoid the flames. I think many people, once they lost power, obviously were not watching television. People got in their cars and were listening to the radio. It's reminiscent to me of 9 11. I was here in New York as an NYU freshman and this feeling was triggered in me during the fires of walking down a side street in New York and having people gather around a car, an automobile, listening to the radio turned up all the way to understand what was happening in lower Manhattan. And it felt a lot like that to me that it didn't feel like there was one way to look or one thing to do in order to understand what was happening in the moment.
- [06:45]
A
Yeah. We also know that there was for some people, reluctance to leave their homes. Can you talk about what that decision looks like?
- [06:54]
B
I think that there's two things that people were weighing and I think my brother, my sister in law and her family with whom they were living are a good example of this. It's like, is this really. Is this really happening? And if it is, and when they realize it really is, sometimes it's too late to feel like you have time to get anything out or do anything really other than try to stay and be a last line of defense. The idea that we needed to evacuate or the idea that our entire community was at risk of, of burning to the ground, of carbonizing. It's a hard thing to wrap your head around that it's possible. And that was sort of the thing I heard from both the Palisades and Altadena. I think everybody made their own calculation whether or not they got those evacuation alerts.
- [07:38]
A
Jacob reported on the ground for days wearing eye protection and masks on air, assessing the damage and trying to make sense of the loss.
- [07:47]
B
This is the Palisades Public Library. It's still on fire. I brought my kids here. This was like the pride of the community when this thing was built. The weight of it all, I think is Very, very intense to think about.
- [08:00]
A
He spoke to a restaurant employee he knows named Albie Fuentes at the site of the eatery where he worked for 15 years. The cafe was reduced to rubble.
- [08:10]
B
What was it about this place that made it so special and made it so popular?
- [08:16]
C
The enormous effort to make it like a second home, you know, for everybody.
- [08:20]
B
What does it feel like to be here?
- [08:24]
C
I have to cry so much in hope. I have cried so much on these last days. It's so hard. It's so hard.
- [08:31]
A
Jacob also came across two people riding bikes through the closed off streets, coming to check if their homes were still standing.
- [08:39]
C
I mean, I know my house is gone, but I kind of just need to see it firsthand to just let it sit in.
- [08:45]
B
I just can't believe I thought I was gonna wake up this morning and it's gonna be a bad dream.
- [08:51]
A
Then Jacob found his own childhood home. And he stood before it with the cameras rolling. Only a few exterior walls and the chimney remained.
- [08:59]
B
I look around the town, the neighborhood, the place that I grew up in, I talk to my friends who I spend so much time with on these streets, and it's hard to imagine what comes next and what happens next.
- [09:11]
A
Jacob's connection to the loss that these communities feel was a big driver for him to write this book.
- [09:17]
B
But.
- [09:17]
A
But another major theme emerged while homes were still on fire. Calls for accountability. This was just two weeks before President Biden's term ended and President Trump was sworn in. And the responses were politically charged.
- [09:33]
B
There's politics on all levels. There's the local politics in Los Angeles. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on a diplomatic mission to Ghana on behalf of the Biden administration, was.
- [09:41]
A
Not in town at the time.
- [09:43]
B
Right. Despite the warnings of the fire. And there's a lot of anger and parts of Los Angeles, particularly in the Palisades because of that. And then President Elect Trump was monitoring all of this and almost live tweeting on his own social media platform an extraordinary amount of disinformation about what was happening on the ground. And I think all of these things converged in the moment to both increase the levels of anxiety for people on the ground and confuse people in the aftermath about what had actually happened and how and where you go from here. And then just days, weeks after the fire, President Trump was sworn into office again. And one of his first trips was out to Los Angeles during the aftermath of the fires in order to take a look.
- [10:26]
C
I appreciate the governor coming out and meeting me, Kevin, very much. And we'll Be talking a little bit. We want to get it fixed. We want to get the problem fixed.
- [10:38]
B
And that, too was an extraordinary moment between Governor Newsom, who I spoke to at length for the book, and the president, the newly sworn in president for his second term, about how politics plays into disaster recovery today. It's unavoidable. And how undoubtedly the decisions made by this administration will affect the future outcomes of future natural disasters on this scale and at this scope.
- [11:01]
A
Well, let's talk a little bit about some of what Trump was saying at the time. Again, not yet in office, but on the verge of taking office. He was sharing these incorrect theories about water.
- [11:12]
B
Yeah.
- [11:12]
A
He was saying there was no available water for the firefighters to use.
- [11:16]
B
Right.
- [11:16]
A
And that it was largely the fault of Governor Newsom's water policies.
- [11:20]
C
This is a true tragedy and it's a mistake of the governor. And you could say the administration, they don't have any water. They didn't have water in the fire hydrants.
- [11:29]
A
Now, later it was determined that there was plenty of available water, but because so many fire hydrants and hoses were being used, there wasn't enough pressure in the system for fire to sufficiently fight the flames. But tell me how this played out in that moment, in those early days and hours of this disaster unfolding.
- [11:51]
B
You know, there was certainly low to no pressure during the fire. And I think that sort of the, for me, the part of the book and the incident that sort of sums up best how the firefighters felt about why the pressure was so low in the hydrants, despite the fact that there was in the Palisades 117 million gallon reservoir, the Santa Ynez Reservoir, that was empty as a city controlled reservoir and it was under maintenance and repairs. Again, not absolving anybody for that. But the firefighters essentially said that this confluence of events, the amount of water they had to flow, and this was said by firefighters on the ground, actually in a live stream to Elon Musk, who was there almost unbelievably, kind of pressing forward on all of these conspiracy theories at the time. They debunked them in real time in Malibu along the coast. There was no shortage of water in the Palisades. There was a shortage of water at a certain point. Or is that not? Well, we were just, we were flowing just an amount of water that the system couldn't overbear just because of how much water these firefighters were utilizing. Okay, all right. They just said there wasn't enough pressure, so much water needed to flow that it wasn't possible to extinguish all of these flames, given the winds they were facing and the ferocity of the, of the firestorm.
- [13:06]
A
Mm. Yeah, that's right. This was pre Doge days. Elon Musk, not yet in the Trump administration, but he did show up on the ground and had donated some cybertrucks and Starlink units, satellite units. Yeah.
- [13:21]
B
And that's not to say that the firefighters didn't appreciate it, but the idea that a conspiracy theory, whether it was President Trump saying that there was water that could flow from the Pacific Northwest, not true. Down to Southern California, that would have extinguished the fires. At one point, I think he said, we don't need reservoirs. Paraphrasing here. In order to hold water.
- [13:41]
C
You know, you don't even need reservoirs with the water coming down. You don't need the reservoir. You have so much water, you don't need it. You only have reservoirs because you're trying to hold water, but you have natural water coming down along the coast.
- [13:55]
B
None of it made any sense, frankly. And all it did was make things harder on the ground for the people that were trying to fight the flames in real time and hindered the efforts to recover. It's the politics of blame and misinformation and disinformation that has emerged as almost a constant to every natural disaster now. And until Republicans stop pretending like this isn't happening and Democrats stop pretending like this is a future threat, and we all see this for what's happening right now, we're not gonna see eye to eye on all of this. And so this too was something that I hadn't thought a lot about when I was standing out there. But in the aftermath, I've thought about to an extraordinary degree.
- [14:34]
A
Well, one year later, now it's clear Governor Newsom and President Trump still don't see eye to eye on a lot of this, certainly on federal aid and a lot of recovery related efforts. Can you tell me the latest on their relationship and what is still in contest?
- [14:54]
B
Sure. As we sit here. And again, I'm not this, I'm not. Nobody is absolved here. Gavin Newsom, by the way, said to me when I interviewed him for Meet the Press that he was going to institute a Marshall Plan for Los Angeles to rebuild. I haven't seen that Marshall Plan announced and I haven't seen, you know, Governor Newsom with some extraordinary proposal to get Los Angeles rebuilt faster than ever. But he did go to Washington D.C. just recently at the end of the year 2025 to meet with congressional leaders and he says to attempt to meet with the administration after he has requested billions of dollars of additional federal aid, which he did get originally from the Biden administration. And what his office has said is that he was rebuffed by the Trump administration. He couldn't even get a meeting. And the Trump administration, you know, again, rolls out the, the ad hominem insults, new scum, everything that you would anticipate that they would say instead of saying, here's how we're all working together. Trump wants everybody to know that it's been the fastest environment in the history of the country and that he takes credit for that. But that Newsom is a failure and that he's doing nothing to help. I don't think any of that helps anybody. I don't think anybody thinks any of that helps anybody. And it continues to play out.
- [16:04]
A
I mean, Governor Newsom has talked about efforts that he's making. He's rolling back certain building related codes that have historically gummed up the process of getting building done faster and moving faster. What has been the upshot of those kinds of moves?
- [16:22]
B
He had suspended CEQA and the Coastal Act, a couple of sort of landmark environmental regulations in order to allow people to rebuild faster. I think the challenge for so many people is not necessarily these regulations, but the cost, the prohibitive cost of finding their way back. And my own sibling story is one of them. And I'm just watching it play out up close. Affordability is a primary reason why I think many people are not going to show up back in the Palisades to rebuild their lives or in Altadena to rebuild their lives. The cost of living in all of these places is high enough already where with an insurance market that makes it extraordinarily difficult, particularly for people whose homes survived the fires, is leading to, I think, prohibitive hurdles for so many people to coming back. And I mean, I can just tell you they don't know the answers to these questions I'm telling you about. From the residents perspective. They don't know what to do or where to go. And they feel like it's a long way off. What do you do when an entire community is wiped off the map? I don't think that there are easy answers and I don't think people are finding them from their politicians, state, local or federal.
- [17:29]
A
Yeah, well, what are people talking about amongst themselves as you've spoken to residents, people who are considering their next move? What do they talk about having lost in all of this? What do they talk about wanting to preserve in all of this?
- [17:45]
B
I think that there is a Profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on. And like when someone dies and obviously 31 people did in this case, and none of us will ever experience the grief that those families are feeling. What was lost is incalculable. You know, two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone now. And so everybody has to make individual decisions for themselves. Those same text threads that I detail in the book in real time as the fire unfolded are now lighting up with, hey, did you see that the house down the block is for sale? We're trying to figure out if we can rebuild or if we're going to go live with, you know, our family members in another city, if we're going to leave the state entirely. Those are the conversations that are happening today. And I don't think that the ramifications of what has happened and sort of literally the population shifts that are happening are going to be understood, if not now, you know, even for years to come.
- [18:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is a story about climate change.
- [18:55]
B
Yeah.
- [18:55]
A
About the present realities of climate change, not just the future of climate change. But there are so many other factors that you've brought up here just in our conversation today. The politics, the population growth, the fact that these were really very populous areas, the way that disaster communication worked and didn't work for people. Can you help me understand sort of all these different factors and where we are today in mitigating them?
- [19:29]
B
Yeah. You know, one of the lenses through which I looked at this is how the federal government's response has affected or will affect the recovery. And one of the things I did in the aftermath of the fires was embed with NASA and their scientists from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hundreds of JPL and Caltech employees lost their homes in the Eaton fire. Yet they are still working every day to try to figure out how to fight, you know, the fires of the future. That's happening at the same time as the NASA Earth Sciences program is on the potential chopping block under this administration. The same can be said of NIOSH National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. I went to Morgantown, West Virginia, and stood on a street corner as workers there protested the cuts from Doge at the beginning of this administration, some of which were going to eliminate workers that dealt with firefighter health and safety in the aftermath of fires just like this. What happens if a firefighter dies? How do we study that? What do we do? The national weather Service, where Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dave Gomberg predicted the outcome of this fire, has lost Employees and meteorologists at offices around the country. Within Health and Human Services, There have been changes to, to the operational structure of how responses happen to disasters like this. So I think that it's such a dynamic situation because it's not just the people on the ground, but it's the way in which we understand the fires, we predict them and then we respond to them. In the aftermath, the billion dollar disaster registry at NOAA was effectively eliminated by this administration. We may never officially know the toll, the cost of this fire because Adam Smith, the lead project researcher on that project, left his job and is no longer there. And for decades we have tracked natural disasters that have been fueled largely by climate change through the federal government. We're no longer doing that and there will no longer be an official estimate. It's been essentially picked up by the private sector, non governmental organizations. That's sort of the landscape of where we are at as it relates especially to the federal government under this administration to respond to and mitigate natural disasters. What I will say though, is in the face of these types of cuts, this story has given me profound hope that there are ways to deal with this.
- [21:51]
A
Say more about that. What are some of the positive developments that you've seen?
- [21:55]
B
Those workers on the street corner in Morgantown, West Virginia that were protesting the cuts to niosh, the day laborers who, in the face of raids at Home Depots throughout Southern California, are still showing up at protests of their own to push back and continue to work on the recovery. The scientists like Holly Bender, who goes up with imaging spectrometry technology to map fires from the sky in order to better fight them from the ground. All these people I have come into contact with as I reported this book, and you read their stories about what firefighting could and should look like going forward. And so I think that there's a push pull because of the politics, but it is the people always that seem to rise up. And that, as I said, have given me really extraordinary hope in a really, you know, it can only be described as an awful situation.
- [22:47]
A
Yeah. Tell me what you take away from all of this. I mean, you didn't just approach this like it was your assignment for the day or the week or even a couple months. You dug all the way in, as you do often with the topics that you take dear to heart, that not.
- [23:02]
B
Only is this the fire of the future, but that it teaches us a lot about our planet, about my city that I love so much, and it made me think a lot about what community means to all of us. What it means to be in community, what it means to support each other, what it means to go through a trauma of this nature, what it means to report on other people's traumas, and what it means when politics intervenes in something that is so deeply, deeply personal. And the book is dedicated to my fellow Angelenos, not just to one person, but to the millions of people that live in Los Angeles county. Because in some way the millions of us all experience this together. And I hope that people around the country and around the world will pick up this book and experience it with us as well. Because this is not some far fetched Hollywood story. This is coming to a community near you, probably your own. You don't have to live in the mountains. You don't have to live down by the coast. This can happen anywhere. And there are lessons in the book for all of us about how to treat each other better and how to better recover, hopefully, together.
- [24:13]
A
Well, Jay, thank you so much for your time.
- [24:14]
B
Shamita, thank you. As always.
- [24:20]
A
We'll include a link to Jacob Soboroff's book Firestorm on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find.