When Lies Spread Like Wildfire

Summary

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Question Everything – Episode Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Question Everything
Host: Brian Reed
Episode: "When Lies Spread Like Wildfire"
Date: January 8, 2026

This special episode explores the devastating Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires that swept through Los Angeles a year ago, the unprecedented destruction they caused, and the personal and ethical challenges faced by the journalists who covered them. Gathered at the Good Neighbor Bar—now a community hub in fire-ravaged Altadena—four LA-based reporters discuss reporting in their own neighborhoods, navigating trauma, the responsibilities and limits of journalism, environmental fallout, and the role of misinformation in disaster recovery.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Immediate Impact and Community Loss

• Setting & Context: The panel convenes at Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena, in front of a large map detailing destroyed (red), surviving (black), and deadly (black circle/white house) homes after the Eaton Fire. (00:08–01:53)
• The fires killed 31, destroyed over 16,000 buildings, and accrued ~$65 billion in damages—the biggest in U.S. history.
• The bar became a nerve center post-fire, with proprietor Randy Clement coordinating community updates via wine shop delivery software.

Notable Quote:
"This is unbelievable. Almost this entire map is red. This is an entire community nearly wiped off the map." – Leanne Suter [02:08]

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2. Journalists as Both Witnesses and Victims

• Personal Stakes: All four journalists (Tony Briscoe – LA Times; Michelle Zacharias – Calo News; Jacob Soboroff – formerly MSNBC, now MSNow; Leanne Suter – ABC 7) directly experienced the fires’ devastation, some losing homes or reporting as their communities burned.
• Processing Trauma:
  • Leanne Suter: "You learn to put up a wall and separate yourself from the story... But this one was different. It was home... the entire community is gone. Just knowing that it was your place, that's what's so hard." [05:12]
  • Jacob Soboroff's childhood home burned, sparking a journey to process grief that became a book. [04:13–12:20]

Memorable Moment:
Jacob describes seeing his childhood home’s ruins and FaceTiming his mother live on air:
"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. ...I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that all of those memories are gone." – Jacob Soboroff [10:08–12:14]

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3. Ethics and Human Realities of Reporting

• Boundary-Blurring Roles: Journalists in the fire zones confronted requests to act as go-betweens for desperate residents seeking information about their properties.
  • Michelle Zacharias made the controversial decision to check on individual homes for families:
    "I decided I would go ahead and do that... at the end of the day, I'm a human being before I'm a journalist." [13:38–14:33]
• Live Reporting Consequences:
  • Leanne Suter recounts informing a woman live on air that her complex had burned down. [16:24–17:21]

Notable Quote:
"I felt it was really important to show these people that I wasn't just some journalist coming in to their community to extract a story to get my headline. I was going to be there to be a public servant, as journalists were intended to be." – Michelle Zacharias [17:53]

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4. Environmental Dangers and Institutional Failures

• Hidden Hazards:
  • Tony Briscoe uncovered that, for the first time in nearly 20 years, federal authorities (Army Corps of Engineers/FEMA) did not conduct the customary soil testing for toxic contamination after the fires. [21:39–23:05]
  • LA Times journalists conducted their own limited sampling, finding hazardous contamination at 20% of tested properties in Altadena. [24:25–25:29]
• Socioeconomic & Racial Factors:
  • Historically Black and Latino communities, often underinsured and with generational wealth tied to homes, bore disproportionate losses. [26:20–27:19]
  • Vulnerable groups (disabled, elderly, chronically ill) were hardest hit due to inadequate evacuation protocols.

Highlight:
"Old homes really carry unfortunately toxic materials... When it all turns to ash, you're talking about leaded paint... arsenic... It's all suffused within the soil." – Tony Briscoe [21:39]

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5. Warning System Breakdowns and Inequality

• Alert System Failures:
  • Many (particularly in minority-dominated West Altadena) never received phone alerts; authorities blamed mapping errors and lack of historic fire risk in those zones. [27:24–27:56]
  • The scale and speed overwhelmed resources—no power, no deputies to go door-to-door, no TV, no alerts.

Notable Quote:
"West Altadena, largely minority, didn't get a single alert... They say the map it was using to send out the alert didn’t include this area because this wasn’t a traditional fire zone." – Leanne Suter [27:24–27:53]

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6. The True Death Toll & Long-Term Health

• Health Impacts:
  • Official death toll: 31, but indirect deaths from smoke and airborne toxins likely exceeded 400. [29:34–29:56]
  • Firefighters anticipate and accept long-term cancer and respiratory risks. [30:00]

Memorable Moment:
"I talked to firefighters who during the fire said I'm probably going to get cancer from being in this fire and fighting it, knowing what's burning right now..." – Jacob Soboroff [30:00]

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7. Disinformation & the Politics of Disaster

• Narrative Wars:
  • Amid the fires, public figures (President-elect Trump and Elon Musk) spread falsehoods blaming government water management, undermining official information and response. [32:41–34:30]
  • Jacob Soboroff describes being called, unexpectedly, by Katie Miller (Stephen Miller's wife), requesting he check on Miller’s parents' house—even as Musk and Trump publicly spread misinformation. [33:31–34:26]

Notable Quote:
"With the polarized politics that we have, there's an incredible amount of misinformation and disinformation seeping into not only recovery, but the response to the fires in real time." – Jacob Soboroff [34:26]

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8. Root Causes and Moving Forward

• Multiple Interlocking Causes:
  • Panelists agree the fires’ devastation is due to climate change, aging infrastructure, development choices, inequality, and media disinformation—there is no single villain or easy answer.
  • The discussion concludes with reflections on the cycle of disaster, memory, and the city’s future.

Quote:
"They want an answer... one bad guy, right? ...And these aren't. These are multi layered as to what's causing this." – Leanne Suter [35:30]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:58] – Visualizing destruction: the color-coded Altadena map
• [03:05] – Firefighters’ health risks and toxic exposure
• [04:13] – Panelist introductions and personal connections
• [05:12] – Leanne Suter on breaking the journalistic wall
• [10:08–12:14] – Jacob Soboroff confronts loss of his childhood home
• [13:38–14:33] – Michelle Zacharias on crossing reporting boundaries to help residents
• [16:24–17:21] – Leanne Suter delivers devastating news live on air
• [21:39–23:05] – Tony Briscoe exposes government lapse in toxic soil testing
• [27:24–27:53] – West Altadena receives no evacuation alerts
• [29:34–29:56] – Indirect death toll from toxins and smoke, up to 400
• [32:41–34:26] – Disinformation: Trump, Musk, and journalists striving for truth
• [35:30–36:50] – Multi-layered causes and the necessity for broad systemic change

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Key Takeaways

• The most devastating fires in US history exposed not only infrastructural weaknesses but also stark socio-economic inequalities and government failures.
• Journalists found themselves blurring professional boundaries, acting as community liaisons and sources of urgent, life-and-death information.
• Systemic neglect—lack of alerts, absence of soil testing, and exposure to toxic remnants—disproportionately affected marginalized communities.
• Misinformation during the crisis, amplified by political figures, materially affected public understanding and recovery efforts.
• Healing from disaster requires both chronicling loss and fighting for accountability—work that these journalists continue as the city rebuilds.

Transcript

[Michelle Zacharias]

So here we are outside Good Neighbor Bar in West Altadena.

[Brian Reed]

Wine and Spirits, 2311 Lincoln Ave Altadena, CA.

[Jacob Soboroff]

We are standing out front of the.

[Brian Reed]

Map that we made for people to see what actually happened on the night of The Eaton Fire. January 7, 2025.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Around this time a year ago.

[Brian Reed]

That's correct. A year ago yesterday, Los Angeles started burning. One fire started right near where our producer Sophie Kazis is standing in Eaton Canyon, above Altadena, a residential community just northeast of downtown la. And another exploded closer to the coast in the Pacific Palisades. That one, authorities say was started by an arsonist. Two different fires, both fueled by dry conditions, spread by hurricane force winds. The fires killed 31 people. They destroyed more than 16,000 buildings. They were the most expensive in history, adding up to some $65 billion in losses. Our producer Sophie is on the main drag of Altadena with Randy Clement, who owns Good Neighbor Bar and the wine shop. It's attached to West Altadena Wine and Spirits with his wife. Good Neighbor Bar survived the fire and has become a nerve center of sorts in the years since. In the hours and days after the fire, Randy drove around in his pickup truck and sometimes even hiked into the evacuation zone, using his wine shop's delivery software to help send updates to residents about the state of their houses. Now he and some others have put up this giant map right outside the bar of Altadena with every house in town depicted on it. And if you look on the map, the red houses denote the houses that were totally lost.

[Jacob Soboroff]

The black are the houses that are still there.

[Brian Reed]

And then the black circles with the.

[Jacob Soboroff]

White houses inside, that's where the people died.

[Leanne Suter]

This is unbelievable. Almost this entire map is red. This is an entire community nearly wiped off the map.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Yeah, that's what it shows.

[Brian Reed]

From KCRW and Placement Theory, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything. Today we have a special episode. We swap our regular wine shop in New York for Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena, California. A year after the costliest fires in US history, a level of devastation Californians are still coming to grips with. We get together four LA based reporters who covered the fires in the center of the destruction to talk about what it was like to suit up in gear and report on this tragedy as their own towns and neighborhoods and even houses they'd lived in burned to the ground. What was it like doing their jobs through all that and what have they learned in the years since?

[Jacob Soboroff]

I talked to firefighters who during the fire said, I'm probably going to get cancer. They knew we were going to be coughing up black shit. You could tell by the smell that it was clearly toxic and it was going to be living literally within, probably all of us forever.

[Brian Reed]

Stick around.

[Tony Briscoe]

It's a cool space, man. Such a cool bar. It's really good to hear that.

[Brian Reed]

The reporters we brought together at goodneighbor Bar on a Monday night a few weeks ago, they covered the blazes as they were happening in la, some very early on the scene, and they've continued to cover the aftermath. We're joined by Tony Briscoe, an environmental reporter for the LA Times, and Michelle Zacharias, a local reporter for Calo News, which covers Latino communities throughout California. Both Tony and Michelle are transplants to la, both by way of Chicago.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Actually, I moved to California about five years ago.

[Tony Briscoe]

Yeah, I lived there for eight years. I'm from Michigan originally.

[Brian Reed]

Our other two guests are longtime Angelenos. Jacob Soboroff is a senior political and national reporter for what at the time of the fires was still known as msnbc. Now it's Ms. Now.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I grew up in the Palisades and my childhood home burned down during the fires. And it was, you know, probably the most personal story I've ever covered. And so because I had a hard time processing it in real time, I wrote a book this year about it.

[Brian Reed]

Jacob's book came out this week. It's called Firestorm the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster. And our final guest has been a local TV reporter for ABC 7 Los Angeles for more than 20 years. Her name's Leanne Suter.

[Leanne Suter]

I'm glad you said that about struggling with it because it's been hard for me to say that, but this has definitely impacted me. Yeah. Because it's my home, too.

[Brian Reed]

Leanne lives right near here. From the moment we started talking, it was clear how few opportunities these reporters have had to talk about the effect the fires have had on them. They've just been heads down, working.

[Leanne Suter]

I can still cry so easily about it, but you realize that that's what. It's impacted you so, so much and so deeply.

[Brian Reed]

What's been hard for you to say?

[Leanne Suter]

Just to say that, you know, we're, we're journalists. Right. You know, you learn to put up a wall and separate yourself from the story so that I can tell the story and you don't get too personally invested in them. And I'm a pro at that. But this one was different. This one, it was home, you know, seeing my friends homes, it's seeing the place that I called home and it was all gone. It wasn't just like, you know, a house or two or a block or two. The entire community is gone. Just knowing that it was your place, that's what's so hard. Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

Am I read that you were one of the first journalists to respond to the Eaton fires? Or the first. Is that right?

[Leanne Suter]

One of the first, I think.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah.

[Leanne Suter]

For television. We were here, we got here where it started at Eaton Canyon. Right. So it comes up the canyon. There were homes that line the rim of the canyon. There were flames, you know, all the way up to the top of the trees going over the houses. So I thought, okay, this is where it's gonna start. This is gonna be really bad. When those winds come in, you really have to hold yourself steady. And the winds were howling. I mean, it's howling 80 mile an hour winds. Sounds like a freight train is coming through the trees here. Like, here comes another one. You can hear it kind as it starts. That is the problem for all of these firefighters. You could see the embers being blown up into the air. So it literally is blowing higher than the houses. And then all of a sudden you realize it's down the street. This truly came up so quickly. So many folks up here really didn't even have time to grab anything. They had to just jump. Here comes one of these gusts we're talking about.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yep.

[Leanne Suter]

These things are so strong. I have covered a lot of fires in my time.

[Brian Reed]

What's it like to report in a fire?

[Leanne Suter]

You know, we have our equipment, we wear. We wear fire protective coverings and whatnot.

[Michelle Zacharias]

I.

[Leanne Suter]

We have a helmet we are supposed to wear. The winds were so strong, I couldn't keep it on my head. And I've been in fires before where I felt the embers and your hair starts to catch on fire. So I had to. I had a cotton hoodie on, which you gotta wear cotton in these. You learn that in our fire training. I had it tied around my face so like literally all that was available was my face. I had goggles on and I had on a mask. It's crazy. I've covered fires here in LA for almost three decades and so I've seen it all. I would say I've seen homes burn. I've seen neighborhoods. I've never seen or experienced anything like this ever in my life.

[Brian Reed]

And what was unique, the size of.

[Leanne Suter]

The embers, they were the size of like a tennis ball. They were. I've never seen embers that big. It was the winds, I mean, I was in hurricane force winds.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I was watching you. I mean, like to have embers fly horizontally across your face. To have embers flying around like it's rain or hail.

[Brian Reed]

Again, this is Jacob Soboroff from MSNow, aka MSNBC.

[Jacob Soboroff]

What Liam is describing to me is why I think what particularly local television news did was definitionally a public service during the fires. There are so many failures of governmental entities and the people that we normally rely on to provide us information and be a backstop or save lives and to watch local news. It was unbelievable before the choppers were in the air and you could see the overlay of the streets and what streets were on fire and what streets weren't. Reporters were on every street from every outlet. And it's not just televisions, print reporters, radio reporters. I was in awe. And you know, on the national news and on cable news, we're only on the air until midnight, east coast time. It's very east coast centric. So, like, we pack it up when we go home. You guys were on the air hours straight without commercial interruption. Yeah, when does that ever. I'm getting the chills even talking about it. When does that ever happen?

[Leanne Suter]

At one point, we're standing there live on the street and all of a sudden I hear this noise. Oh, my gosh. That's a steel barrel. And right next to us is this massive steel drum, big blown all the way down the street. And you.

[Brian Reed]

Like a big oil canister.

[Leanne Suter]

Big oil canister flew through the air, landed with a bang next to us and just kept blowing down the street.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Wow.

[Leanne Suter]

And you think that could have taken out any firefighter that could have taken out. I mean, and it dawned on me, we're in a hurricane. I mean, these are hurricane force winds. They nearly blew me over. They blew me into the camera several times. And yeah, we just kept going nonstop.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I got there, I think, on the corner of Amalfi and Sunset in the Palisades.

[Brian Reed]

That's Jacob again.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I could see it burning from over Will Rogers State Historic Park. And I knew on the other side of the hill was literally my community, my neighborhood that I grew up in.

[Brian Reed]

What was it like to see your childhood home vanish?

[Jacob Soboroff]

Not great. Not great. It was. I don't, you know, I don't know. I've still fully wrapped my head around it.

[Brian Reed]

You did it on air. Like, how did you think about it?

[Jacob Soboroff]

I just said, let's go. I didn't even want to go see it first. I just said, let's go and see if it's still there. 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. When I rolled up, honestly, the only thing I could think to do was, like, FaceTime. My. My mom. Mom, look at this.

[Leanne Suter]

Is that Frontiera?

[Brian Reed]

Yeah.

[Tony Briscoe]

Yep.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Oh, I'm so sad. It makes me sad, too. I moved out of that house probably when I was 6 or 7. But, like, that's the house I was born into, and all my siblings, other than one of us, was born into that house. This was a really, really special place for the Soaproff family, and I'm very sorry to see it go. It wasn't just my house. It was the library, the Palisades Public Library. It's still on fire. This was, like, the pride of the community when this thing was built. It was the Palisades park that my mom and dad raised money in 1986 to build a new playground. And there was still a plaque on the wall. A whole park burned down. All of the restaurants that I had gone to as a little kid, this was the Ralph Supermarket. It's awful. Look at all these terracotta tiles. These were a feature of a lot of the architecture here in Pacific Palisades. You know, you would sort of sit. Virtually everything other than sort of a new, fancy shopping center that was protected by private firefighters had burned down. I can close my eyes and walk around and tell you what this place used to look like, and it is no more. I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that all of those memories are gone. Experiencing that, I think what everybody's experienced in some ways is we're all grieving in Los Angeles. This has been the worst year in a long time for people that live in this city, which is why I wanted to spend so much time actually talking to other people about what they had experienced, too, because there are thousands of people who had similar situations and similar stories.

[Brian Reed]

What are you trying to figure out for yourself? I'm interested in the crossover here of, like, your work and this very personal thing that you're experiencing grief.

[Jacob Soboroff]

What it is to experience grief, period. As a human, it's like, I'm a human, just like I'm like everybody else. It's here. I just happen to be a reporter, and I'm experiencing this together. And so I actually found shared experience with so many people. You feel sadness and you feel guilt and you feel regret that you haven't spent more time there or with your own family. Like, it Made me feel things about not being as connected as I want to be with. I'm one of five kids and my mom and dad, and we don't spend a ton of time together. My brother and his wife were pregnant with their first kid, and the house they were living in burned down. Like, I think I was pretty depressed after the fire and continued to report on. The fire afforded me a really amazing opportunity to connect with other people in a really extraordinary way.

[Michelle Zacharias]

You know, for me, I'm not born and raised in Southern California. I'm originally from Chicago. I'd never witnessed an environmental disaster at that magnitude.

[Brian Reed]

This is Michelle Zacharias. She reports for Calo News, which is a community center newsroom that covers stories affecting Latinos in LA and throughout the Southwest.

[Michelle Zacharias]

And I remember when we drove up to the barricade where the general public was blocked off in the aftermath of the fire, there were so many people there that were just frantically trying to find out the status of their homes. And once they realized that I was a reporter and that I could get access to that, they were, I mean, just begging, like, asking, please check my address. Just make sure my house is still standing. And, like, I made some decisions for myself in that moment, and I decided I would go ahead and do that. And my colleagues and I got into disagreement about it because I think in their thought process, that's not our job, that's not our duty as reporters. But I just kind of told them, like, at the end of the day, I'm a human being before I'm a journalist. And if it doesn't interfere with my story and if it brings these people the slightest semblance of peace, I. I'm gonna do it.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I did it, too. I got no values. I just.

[Brian Reed]

Well, no, I feel like I actually have more questions for your colleagues. What were they saying about why they wouldn't do that?

[Michelle Zacharias]

I think there was concern there. Some of my colleagues do come up in very traditional journalism kind of upbringings in schools, and I didn't go to undergraduate school for journalism. So I think my personal values and rules around how to report are a little bit different. The reality is there's no such thing as objectivity in journalism. And in such a human centered story, there really wasn't any space to stand rigidly in objectivity either. Right. And so we went in and every time we drove up to a new address, I just. There was so much tension in my body because I didn't know what I was going to have to tell people over text. And thankfully, in My case, every single one of the homes we drove up to was still intact.

[Brian Reed]

Wow.

[Leanne Suter]

Wow, that's amazing.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Nobody was there. Everybody left. Yeah, it was us. Other journalists, firefighters, first responders, but no residents. I mean, some people hung out, but then they had to go. And that's when, you know, you become, whether you like it or not, the eyes and the ears on the ground for everybody else. And I was able to get inside the Palisades and started reporting live on msnbc. My phone's blowing up. All my childhood friends and people who I had heard from in years, carpool mates, from driving to high school, I.

[Leanne Suter]

Too had the same thing. I had so many people, so many people that wanted me to check on, on their homes. I literally had a list and I would just kind of drive around to find it. But I had the unfortunate we're fortunate, however you want to look at it, of letting a viewer know live on television what happened. It was. It was crazy.

[Brian Reed]

How did that go down?

[Leanne Suter]

10 o' clock at night. And I had gotten into Dove Creek Townhomes, which is a large townhome complex just south of Eaton Canyon. And we were on live, just going nonstop, wall to wall coverage, as we call it, Right? So I had heard someone had called in and they said, hold on, we have a woman on the phone named Lisa and she lives in the Dove Creek townhome complex. And I was listening to her, she kept saying, well, you know, I see your reporter, but I can't tell if my home is still standing.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Wow.

[Leanne Suter]

She needed an answer. And so while she was talking, I realized, okay, I gotta, I have to find a way to get around. So I managed to kind of sprint quick in. I looked, I came back and interrupted on the air. I just wanted to update Elisa, I apologize, and I hate to say this, but we have been able to walk down and confirmed everything on the street, all the way down around the bend where her home is. I think you guys all are blonde to find. I mean, it was a raging inferno on both sides of the street. Everything was gone.

[Brian Reed]

It strikes me to hear you guys talk like it's. It's almost like the most pure expression of reporting that I can imagine. It's like talk about news. You can use, like, information, like, is my house burned down? You're there, I can't go, here's my house number. And you go look and tell them on the air. It's like the purest. That's why I'm so, like, I am hung up on your colleagues, like not wanting to go you know, tell people who are asking if their houses are there or not. It's like, what's the unethical part of that? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to be doing is providing information that people can't get?

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yeah. And, you know, whether or not it was broadcasted, I felt it was really important to show these people that I wasn't just some journalist coming in to their community to extract a story to get my headline. I was going to be there to be a public servant, as journalists were intended to be. And so the people that I met at the barricades, there was one person that specifically said, hey, my uncle stayed back. Can you make sure that he's alive? And I remember we pulled up to the house. It was a beautiful home. And in front of the house is this little group of Latino men just standing out in front of the home. At this point it was controlled. Right. The fires had mostly been put out. And I was like, hey, I'm looking for this individual. And they all pointed to one guy and he was kind of like this older or middle aged Latino man. And I said, you know, your family member's looking for you. And he's like, I'm good. I just stayed back with the home. And I was like, would you mind sharing with me a little bit about why you stayed back? And he actually directed me to his son who was standing next to him, maybe in his late teens or early 20s. And he basically said, this house that you're standing in front of is completely built and designed by my father. This is his dream. He put his everything into creating this home so that he could pass this down to his children. This is a Mexican immigrant from Jalisco. This is his version of the American dream. This is why he came here. And this is the legacy that he's created and he's built. And he planned on leaving to his children. He stayed back. He kept his house hosed down the entire time. And there were multiple occasions when his neighbor's house, directly to the left and the right of him, caught fire and he went and hosed them down.

[Brian Reed]

So it's like a garden hose.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yes, yes. And so the school behind him, the elementary school, completely flattened by the fire right across the street, the house is completely flattened, his home and his two neighbors intact.

[Brian Reed]

Wow.

[Michelle Zacharias]

There was so much history there. There was so many layers there as to why someone would risk so much to save their home.

[Leanne Suter]

And so many, especially in the Eaton fire, so many were underinsured. The only thing they had, their only generational wealth was, was that house.

[Michelle Zacharias]

And I have no doubt in my mind that this man saved not only his home, but his neighbor's home as well.

[Brian Reed]

After a quick break, one of our reporters gets a phone call from someone he did not expect to hear from who was looking for help.

[Leanne Suter]

This is Kim Masters, host of the Business on kcrw. Every week we take a deep dive.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Into the deals and the drama that shape Hollywood. From the power plays in the boardroom to the creative battles on set, we.

[Leanne Suter]

Bring you the inside stories behind the entertainment headlines. Check out the business part of the NPR podcast network.

[Brian Reed]

The fires in Los Angeles burned for nearly a month before they were fully contained. And then the attention turned to cleaning up, rebuilding. For nearly 20 years in California, the practice with fires has been that once the ash and debris are removed, the US Army Corps of Engineers tests the soils at homes and schools for toxic contamination. If the results turn up dangerous chemicals or other material, the federal government pays to clean up the toxic soil to make sure those properties where there are often kids are safe to return to. This is what our guest, Tony Brisco, an environmental reporter for the LA Times, started investigating after thousands of homes burned down.

[Tony Briscoe]

Old homes really carry unfortunately toxic materials and they're typically safe to live with. But you know, when it all turns to ash, you're talking about leaded paint. Lead is a brain damaging chemical. You have lumber was typically coated with arsenic and that's a cancer causing chemical. Then when that burns down, it's all suffused within the soil. And in all fires since 2007 in California, whether it was managed by the state or the federal government, they've done soil testing to ensure that these properties are cleaned up in a very safe way, removing ash, debris and a layer of contaminated soil. In this case, they decided that that was not necessary and they didn't announce it publicly.

[Brian Reed]

And this is the Army Corps of Engineers saying this.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yeah, sorry.

[Brian Reed]

Okay, just checking.

[Tony Briscoe]

The Army Corps of Engineers, they didn't volunteer this. We had a lot of sources that were telling us, you know, you really need to look to what extent they are cleaning these properties up. You really need to ask about soil testing. It actually took me going to a news conference in February asking it in person to get them on the record. Will the Army Corps be returning to these sites to remove more soil if soil testing is conducted?

[Jacob Soboroff]

Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. Thank you for the question. For this incident, we're not conducting soil sampling. What was the reaction in the press conference room when you asked this?

[Tony Briscoe]

Stunned and looking at the Faces of a lot of the LA county representatives who were standing next to them. They looked gobsmacked too. Like a lot of them did not know at that time.

[Jacob Soboroff]

It's so unbelievable. Sorry, go ahead.

[Michelle Zacharias]

No, can I ask. So what was your justification?

[Tony Briscoe]

They said in their opinion, that it was unnecessary.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I don't think anybody thought that we shouldn't be testing for toxic materials within the soil. It was so shocking that it took your question at a press conference for them to ever acknowledge it on the record for the first time. Yeah.

[Tony Briscoe]

And it just raised so many questions about how could this happen? How could we get to a place where such a critical step was skipped? We're talking about California here. Everybody's outside in their yard. I mean, if you have children playing, that's something that they could be exposed to. If you're a gardener, you could possibly be exposed to these things that can cause lifelong harm.

[Brian Reed]

And what's that actual reason? Like, they're saying that they don't need to do it, it's okay. But like, what's actually going on? Do you know?

[Tony Briscoe]

It really boiled down to time and money. They said that that was going to take way too much time to get people back there and that it was going to cost too much money, I guess more money than the federal government was willing to spend. That's what the statement that we got from fema, who was in charge of overseeing disaster response.

[Brian Reed]

But then you guys, like took it upon yourselves at the time, LA Times, to go do the testing.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yeah.

[Tony Briscoe]

So shortly after the federal government, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they were not going to test us with our meager budget at the LA Times, pitched this idea of doing a very limited soil sampling project ourselves. Literally. We bought ppe. We got different coverall, Tyvek, kind of like suits. We got booties because we were going to a slate of homes that had already been cleared and then homes that had survived the fire but had like a lot of ash and debris rained down on their property. And in Altadena, 20% of the properties that we had tested actually came back as having contaminants above the state limit, which is about what we would expect. I mean, that's what past testing has shown, that you're going to have some residual contamination. And for those that exceeded that, they should come back and clear away more soil so that people aren't exposed to this. The issue is we didn't do this comprehensively, so there's going to be so many more properties that are out there. And if you just kind of extrapolate that out, you're talking about hundreds if not thousands of homes that could be contaminated and people are returning and not knowing it.

[Leanne Suter]

You guys have done some testing and others have done the testing in the houses that have been officially remediated.

[Brian Reed]

That's Leanne there, the LA TV reporter.

[Leanne Suter]

Now, the concerning is that all these houses that have been remediated, they've come up positive, still having these high levels.

[Tony Briscoe]

Of contaminants and there's no recourse for the folks who live there, which is really, really sad. It's like, you know, you find this contamination there and then people are like, okay, well what? Now I remember we talked with a woman who's not only grandma, great grandmother, and she used to have Easter each year at her home. And after us giving her her soil results and she had elevated levels of lead there, decided not to have her family over for fear of what it could do to her great grandchildren. This was a really long tradition for her family. Just really heartbreaking.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah, that's Michelle with Callow News.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Altadena has this history of being a place of black home ownership. And so obviously we know that this is going to become also an issue that overlaps with like, race. When you said that they didn't want to do the additional soil testing, like this feels so on track with historically, like what the federal government is willing to do for marginalized communities or black and brown communities. As a local news reporter, one of the things that I really wanted to do was look at the intersections of those communities that were most directly impacted. And it was clear even in the immediate aftermath, that the folks who lost the most, whether it was loss of homes or loss of life, were disabled, elderly, chronically ill. So I really think that if we take nothing else away from our reporting, it's like we need better evacuation procedures and protocols in place for vulnerable populations.

[Brian Reed]

What are the best practices? Like, what are you supposed to have in place? What's the dream scenario?

[Michelle Zacharias]

I mean.

[Leanne Suter]

Well, I mean, dream scenario, you get the alert on your phone. I mean, everybody has their cell phone. That's the number one way that everybody gets these alerts. Now, they didn't get an alert. West Altadena, largely minority, didn't get a single alert.

[Brian Reed]

Why do we know why?

[Leanne Suter]

Lots of excuses, reasons. They say, you know, the system didn't work properly. The map it was using to send out the alert, they say didn't include this area because this wasn't a traditional fire zone. This isn't where the Fire normally goes, it doesn't come this far and south.

[Brian Reed]

Who's responsible for this? Who's they?

[Leanne Suter]

LA County.

[Brian Reed]

Okay.

[Leanne Suter]

Is. Yeah, yeah. Emergency LA County Office of Emergency Management. I think there's a whole bunch of things that failed and nobody ever took into account that we should look at what we should do if all of this fails. This was a fire of historic proportions. They didn't have enough deputies to go around going door to door to warn everybody. There was no way to do that. There was no power. So nobody was watching TV up in there because they had no electricity. There was no phone alert.

[Michelle Zacharias]

They ran out of water at some points. Yeah.

[Jacob Soboroff]

What's amazing is having grown up in LA as kids they train you in school what to do when the big one strikes, the earthquake. I think every child in Los Angeles that grew up here knows what it, what a drill is to get under the desk at school, what to do if the entire city is on the verge of collapse. But nobody is ever trained what to do if the entire city is on the verge of burning down.

[Leanne Suter]

The coverage you guys were doing, when they're talking about soil testing, Right. Everybody thinks about the fire zone but you guys had the one that showed how far the ash went. I didn't think about the cloud of ash as to where it went because the wind was blowing so strong. And so the testing that you guys did else was doing showed that there was downwind in Pasadena, had this huge pocket of lead and asbestos and ar. All this stuff.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah.

[Tony Briscoe]

And a totally different block of folks who were outside of the fire zone were most affected by, you know, the deposition of all the toxic stuff. But a lot of folks don't even realize that it's a lot of times it's the smoke that has a higher death toll than actually the fires themselves. It's all of these small particles, toxic particles that you're breathing in that can cause heart attacks, stroke, all these after implications.

[Michelle Zacharias]

One of the things that I looked into that like blew me away was obviously the official death toll for the fires was essentially like 31 or something like that. And then I saw a follow up report that was like actually the reality is that indirectly it was closer to like 400 plus people because airborne toxins and smoke and the ways in which it can directly impact our health and.

[Brian Reed]

That'S what accounted for the difference was the smoke. Right.

[Leanne Suter]

So many heart attacks and stuff. Yeah.

[Jacob Soboroff]

I talked to firefighters who during the fire said I'm probably going to get cancer from being in this fire and fighting it, knowing what's burning right now. Not just the old materials inside the houses, but the electric car batteries, thousand electric car batteries or more, something like that, burning. As those firefighters were out there, they knew we were going to be coughing up black shit, you know, for days, yet they did it anyways. And they knew that it was all about the house that was in front of them or the family that had evacuated. You could tell by the smell it was clearly toxic. And it was going to be living literally within. Probably all of us who were in the fires forever.

[Michelle Zacharias]

We know from history, from, you know, even looking at the way that firefighters had long term respiratory issues during 9, 11 and ground zero. Like this is going to be a long term issue. And the best we can do is provide coverage of that, evidence of that, so that down the line, when that does get brought up, when those people are seeking out restitution, there is a paper trail.

[Tony Briscoe]

I still don't think that we fully realize the magnitude of the death toll.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Having not understood what I experienced firsthand as someone who watched my childhood burn up in front of my eyeballs, I went to Washington and I sat down with a senior emergency manager from HHS who I had known as a source from some other reporting on family separation. His name was Jonathan White. He was a captain in Health and Human Services. He's a senior career emergency management official.

[Brian Reed]

Okay.

[Jacob Soboroff]

And so he said to me during the fire, we should talk about this. When I came to Washington, we met. And so we sat down for dinner at a Tex Mex restaurant in Washington, D.C. and over queso and fajitas, he said to me, what you experienced was the fire of the future. And I said, well, why was it the fire of the future? And what he said is, everybody's so desperate to figure out the proximate cause of this. Whether or not it was we didn't have water or this electrical transformer exploded and created the fire, or this politician's to blame. But he said to me, what you experienced was not some unique event. Give me your notepad. Because I was taking notes. And he drew an X on the page. And he said, obviously, climate change on one arm of the X, our infrastructure's falling apart, changes in the way we live, so polluting our environment. And then the final one was misinformation and disinformation. Literally, during this fire, as homes were still burning, as people were evacuated, as people were dying still, the President elected the United States was just saying patently untrue things about what was happening in Southern California.

[Brian Reed]

Trump is, like, about to Take office.

[Jacob Soboroff]

During this time he's about to take.

[Brian Reed]

Office and he's just talking about kind of different water routes and usages in California and how those choices by the governor basically like, have made it so the fires aren't being put out, that.

[Jacob Soboroff]

There was water that could, quote, unquote, flow down from the Pacific Northwest that he was saying could stop the fire or prevent the fire or that in some way, you know, we're releasing literally billions of gallons of water out into farm fields in the Central Valley would protect the residents of Southern California. It was all bullshit.

[Brian Reed]

Jacob told us this pretty surprising story. As the fires were burning and Trump, along with Elon Musk, were spreading lies about it online, Jacob was on the ground trying to get out trustworthy information and he got a call from Trump's inner circle that he did not anticipate.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, called me.

[Brian Reed]

Stephen Miller, one of Trump's top advisors, the architect of his anti immigration agenda. He's from Southern California. His wife Katie was an advisor to Elon Musk when Musk was part of the administration.

[Jacob Soboroff]

And to be honest, I didn't know what she was calling about.

[Brian Reed]

So wait, you just saw like Katie Miller pop up on your phone?

[Michelle Zacharias]

Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

And I talk to her exactly when this happened?

[Jacob Soboroff]

Yeah, yeah. It said Katie Waldman, which was her old name before she married Stephen Miller. I met her when I was covering the family separation crisis in the first Trump term. And we really hadn't talked much since then because we did have an adversarial journalist source relationship after that because I don't think she was a fan of the reporting that I was doing. And I told her I had to call her back. And she texted me and said, you're the only person I know that's there. Steven's parents live there. Can you go check on the house? And just like I did for my carpool mate, and just like I did for my little brother, I drove up to Stephen Miller's parents house and it had burned down. I told her and I felt as awful for her and them as I did for anybody else. At the same time that Katie Miller was calling me to check on Stephen Miller's parents house, her boss, Elon Musk, was amplifying lies being told by the President Elect of the United States. So when we talk about the fire of the future, the natural disaster of the future, I think that there is no way to disconnect the fact that with the polarized politics that we have, there's an incredible amount of misinformation and disinformation seeping into not only recovery, but the response to the fires in real time.

[Brian Reed]

Those lies or any, any others, like, did you see them kind of reverberate in real time, like. Or affect things operating on the ground?

[Jacob Soboroff]

I mean, I spent hours with Gavin Newsom at his office in Sacramento. Is this a liberal Democratic governor, former mayor of San Francisco here in California, was hearing from his own friends that were basically blaming him for the fires because of what Donald Trump was saying. You know, they were buying into the messaging.

[Leanne Suter]

They want an answer. I feel like everybody just wants one person. There's one bad guy, right? Every story has the nemesis, the bad guy, and they want a villain. They want one thing. And these aren't. These are multi layered as to what's causing this and all lending to this issue.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Even ourselves for living in these places.

[Leanne Suter]

Yeah, I was just gonna say.

[Jacob Soboroff]

And in choosing to have the trade off of living in the most beautiful city in the most beautiful county, I think, in the United States, one of the most diverse cities in America, most populous county in America, you have the snow and the beach within a couple hours drive of each other. But that comes at a cost. And as we continue to develop and to build and as inequality gets worse and worse here, it's worse in the state than anywhere else. We got more homeless people that live in Los Angeles county unhoused on the streets than anywhere else in the United States of America. Like all of these things contribute. Capitalism contributes. You know, who we are and where we live and how we live our lives contribute. And until we understand that, you know, we'll never understand why we're going to continue to experience something like this.

[Brian Reed]

That was Tony Briscoe, Michelle Zacharias, Leanne Suter and Jacob Soboroff. Jacob's book Firestorm is available now. Michelle and Leanne are continuing their coverage of the effects of the fires locally. Leanne recently followed up with that woman who called into ABC7 asking Leanne to check on her house live on air and found out some pretty moving details about the woman's story, which Leanne's doing a report on. And Tony just had a story in the LA Times where he uncovered a federal report that alleged contractors and disaster workers may have illegally dumped toxic ash during the cleanup. I really want to thank Randy Clement and April Langford for letting us use goodneighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine and Spirits, and to the rest of the staff there too, helped us out, gave us drinks. They were wonderful hosts and it was just really inspiring to meet them and be there. Please rate and review our show wherever you listen and just as important, share Question Everything with a friend. Every little recommendation helps. I really appreciate it. Today's show was produced by Sophie Kazis and Brendan Baker, edited by Kevin Sullivan and live engineered by Phil Richards, the lead Technical Director at kcrw. Robin Semion and myself are the executive producers of Question Everything. Our team also includes producer Zach St. Louis, contributing editors Neil Drumming and Jen Kinney, and associate producer Kevin Shepard. This episode was fact checked by Annika Robbins, mixing and sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seifel, Tejal Algemera, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrow. And special thanks to Sarah Sweeney and Hope Brush, also at KCRW for their help on this episode and Cecile Rosette whose idea it was it's good to be back after the break. We'll see you next week.

[Michelle Zacharias]

I just got my new phone and the KCRW app is the best way.

[Brian Reed]

To get the music and shows you love from kcrw.

[Tony Briscoe]

And it's been totally redone to be.

[Michelle Zacharias]

Cleaner, faster and more reliable. And there's two new music Dance 24 and Vintage 24 and they're only in the app plus real time now playing so you never miss a track ID.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Look up KCRW in the app store.

[Michelle Zacharias]

And be sure to make a free.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Account to use all the new features.