'Everything I knew burned down around me': A journalist looks back on LA's fires

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. On New Year's Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he said something that would soon come back to haunt him. The last thing I want to be doing, he said, is covering a fire. And that ridiculous yellow outfit - absolutely no way. Just one week later, Jacob was standing on a street corner in Los Angeles in that yellow outfit, reporting live as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised. It's hard to fathom the scale of the devastation that followed. Thirty-one people were killed. Sixteen thousand structures were destroyed. Nearly 40,000 acres burned, an area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, making the Los Angeles fires among the most destructive wildfire events in American history.

Jacob Soboroff was there for all of it and has written about it in a new book called "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires And America's New Age Of Disaster." It's a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists, and political leaders. And it's also an investigation into why it happened and why experts agree it will likely happen again.

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, where he covers immigration, inequality and national politics. His first book, "Separated: Inside An American Tragedy," documented the Trump administration's family separation policy at the border. Jacob Soboroff, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Tonya, thank you so much for having me back.

MOSLEY: So I want to play a clip of your coverage. And this clip, it - I think it's probably around 24 hours after you started reporting. You're standing in a neighborhood. Homes are fully engulfed just feet away from you. Let's listen.

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SOBOROFF: This is an absolutely catastrophic, devastating situation. This is a neighborhood - a wonderful neighborhood. Twenty-three thousand people live here. It is in the city of Los Angeles. It happens to be the neighborhood that I was born and raised in. You look around, and all you see everywhere you look are homes on fire. There's two behind me here - let me show you - on this side of the street. And this is a community that is at the heart of Los Angeles. This is so different than fires past because we have seen wildfires. But we have seen them mostly in remote areas. This is an incredibly urban setting where tens of thousands of people have been told to evacuate these locations. And because of the winds, because of the dryness of the situation here on the ground, because of the lack of rain, it has been a tinderbox. It is not an exaggeration to say it has not only been a windstorm, but it has been a consistent and very dangerous firestorm.

MOSLEY: That's my guest, MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff. Jacob, no journalism school prepares you for covering your hometown being burned to the ground. No, certainly not. What did your family lose in the fire?

SOBOROFF: I just have the chills listening to that back again, and I know exactly when that was. That clip that you just played, I was on the "Today Show," and it was in the very early hours of January 8, so Wednesday morning, the morning after the fire had started, and the Eaton fire had also started in Altadena at the time. And I was standing on Pampas Ricas, which is a street in the Palisades village, which was just down the block from my childhood home, which I didn't know at the time as I was delivering that report. The house I grew up until I think I was around 5 or 6, and all of my siblings, except for one of them - there's five of us - was born into - it burned down. The house my brother and my sister-in-law were living in - she was expecting their first child - burned to the ground - and so many people I knew, so many people I knew, people that I drove in high school carpool. I heard from people I hadn't heard from in years, maybe decades.

This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed. And in fact, I would go back there all the time, even though most of my family no longer live there. Every hallmark of my childhood, I was watching carbonize in front of me. And, you know, you mentioned all these things and these hats that I wear and would be forced to wear. I was not capable of doing that at the time. It was such an overwhelming experience that I knew that I had so many more questions that I had to ask and wanted to answer and needed to for myself.

MOSLEY: One thing that I was thinking about as I was watching the clips of you during that time period - I've covered wildfires, but I would say that I have never been more than maybe, like, a half a mile away.

SOBOROFF: Right.

MOSLEY: You were extraordinarily close. And that clip that we hear, the houses are directly behind you. Can you describe for us what that feels like?

SOBOROFF: Well, you know, you're choking with the smoke. And I almost feel guilty describing it from my vantage point because the firefighters would say things to me like, my eyeballs were burning. We were laying flat on our stomach in the middle of the concrete street because it was so hot, it was the only way that we could open the hoses full bore and try to save anything that we could. But for me, yeah, I could feel - I remember during that report, specifically, I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as we stood in front of these houses that I remember as the houses that - cars and people would line up in front of for the annual Fourth of July parade or the road race that we would run through town. Trees were on fire behind us. We were at risk of structures, you know, falling at any given minute.

And it was pretty surreal because this is a place I had spent so much time as a child and going back to as an adult. And there was really nobody there. There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there. But it was an extremely lonely, isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time. And I had no choice but to just open my mouth and say what I saw to the millions of people that were watching us around the country.

MOSLEY: There's a surreal moment in the book. You're in the middle of the fire. The phone rings, and it's Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife...

SOBOROFF: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Asking you to check on her in-laws' house. And just to give context to this, the last time you spoke, she'd cut you off from your reporting on child family separation. And then, while you're still processing that call, the politics starts. So can you kind of talk me through that day and, actually, that interchange?

SOBOROFF: Yeah. It's surreal. And I'm a political reporter, and that's mostly what I do. And so, you know, some of the sources that operate for me in that universe of the national political environment include people who I met covering family separations, and Katie Miller is one of them. Katie Miller was the junior-most press deputy in the Department of Homeland Security under Kirstjen Nielsen during family separation. And she's the one that allowed me into the detention centers to meet and see these children that were being taken deliberately in 2018 for myself. And you're right. After I published my first book, we lost contact. She didn't - she stopped communicating with me. She - I don't think she was a fan of the reporting, I think it's fair to say. But she called.

I was standing there on that street, on Pampas Ricas, and I was getting ready for a special report with Lester Holt, and I looked down at my phone, and, like, you know, it had just been ringing off the hook with all kinds of people calling me. And it was her. And I picked up very quickly, and I said, I'm about to go on the special report, but I'm going to call you back. And before I was able to call her back, she texted me an address and said, can you go by? It's Stephen's parents' house. And, of course I went by, and they had lost their home, too. And I felt, obviously, awful for them, as I did for any of the people in my universe. It is a paralyzing experience to see that firsthand. But as you said, this is where the politics of misinformation and disinformation come back into this.

MOSLEY: It's a surreal moment.

SOBOROFF: Within minutes of hearing from her, Donald Trump is putting out messages on social media, spreading conspiracy theories about the fire. And then her soon-to-be boss, Elon Musk, at DOGE, is amplifying and echoing some of them. And so it was this moment where I felt, like, cognitive dissonance. I was very, very sad for what they were going through but, as a journalist, extremely frustrated by what I was witnessing coming out of Washington, D.C., and these people in the halls of power at the same time because certainly wasn't helping anybody who was in the line of the fire, not to mention her in-laws.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book "Firestorm," which chronicles the devastating Los Angeles wildfires and what they reveal about America's new age of disaster. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN SONG, "GBEDE TEMIN")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires And America's New Age Of Disaster."

It was Captain Jonathan White - right? - who - he is a federal disaster expert. He helped you see kind of the bigger picture of these fires - climate, infrastructure, modern living, the way we live, and politics...

SOBOROFF: Yes.

MOSLEY: ...Misinformation, disinformation. And I want to actually start with climate. There was one firefighter who said, there's no fire season, it's fire year. And that just made me think about all of the people that you feature in the book and who work in this field, like the resources for firefighters and first responders, especially. What did you find out about the challenges in fighting a catastrophic event like this and the resources that are available? It became a political fight later, but you could see it in real time.

SOBOROFF: In real time. And I think that, you know, there will be a lot of investigative journalism in the years to come about could there have been less destruction and damage and death because of - in the wake of what had happened. And we don't know the answer to that. But what we do know is there are a lot of questions to ask. Could firefighters have been predeployed into different areas earlier and await, you know, the potential spark? Should there have been water in the 117-million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades? Could the infrastructure in Eaton Canyon, these towers that were electrified and sparked and caused the fire, been taken down because they were inactive for years? I mean, all these questions are accountability-related journalism questions that I think are still open-ended questions. There's been an extraordinary amount of reporting on them from - particularly from local journalists here in LA. But what Jonathan White said is there's not one proximate cause of this fire. It's the confluence of all of these things. And if you try to pick one and point a finger at one politician or one particular incident, it's not a full picture of how or why this happened.

MOSLEY: But in particular, when I think about resources and I think about that statement that it's not fire season, it's fire year...

SOBOROFF: Yes.

MOSLEY: ...That changes the calculation on really the deployment of resources. Many of these guys are volunteer firefighters. They're having to, around-the-clock, kind of attend to something that the systems just weren't built for.

SOBOROFF: No, they were not built for it. And in fact, I mean, when you go back and talk about the wind speeds, too, which I think were part of the unprecedented nature of all of this, they couldn't even fly the helicopters at the peak of the fire. Both LA City and LA County air operations had to ground their fleet that normally provides that literal air cover for the firefighters that are on the ground. That's why I open the book with a quote by Mike Davis and his book "Ecology Of Fear" from 1998. This is a quote about Malibu wildfires decades ago. He writes, the exponential growth of housing in foothill fire belts moreover increases the likelihood of several simultaneous conflagrations and stretches regional manpower reserves to their limit or beyond. As one national forest official observed, these fires in Malibu prove that you could throw in every firefighter in the world and still can't stop it.

It actually reminds me of a scene that's in the book where Elon Musk is down at the command post talking to some of the firefighters from the county fire department and sort of poking at them about the conspiracy theories about why water started to run dry in these hydrants. And it was a particular political punching bag or talking point of President-elect Trump, who was watching this from afar. And what the firefighters said, not in a political way at all, but when you're flowing the amount of water that we had to flow to fight all of these fires at the same time, there just isn't enough water pressure, period, in order to be able to stop these fires all over Los Angeles County.

MOSLEY: I think for those who are not from the LA area and are not familiar with the topography or California more in general, they're asking that question, why was there an issue around water when this area is surrounded by water? What was one of the things in addition to understanding that they were putting everything they could into it? There were some other circumstances that also kind of limited that ability for them.

SOBOROFF: The best analogy that - as it's been explained to me, and there are still certainly - I'm not trying to absolve the department of water and power in the city or any of these municipal entities from answering real questions over time about could there have been higher water pressure, but what firefighters said to me at the time - I was with one Tim Larson, who you read about in the book, from 23 - is the station in the Palisades that - whose first in, which is their jurisdiction was the beginning of the Palisades fire. He just said it's like being in your house and turning all the taps on at the same time and expecting your water pressure to remain the same. It's just not possible. And so every hydrant virtually is open in both of these neighborhoods at the same time, different water systems, but the same issue - low to no pressure.

MOSLEY: Then there was the issue of the electrical grid.

SOBOROFF: Yep.

MOSLEY: And you write about this pretty extensively in the book. I mean, what did you learn about the role of power lines?

SOBOROFF: This is why the Eaton fire happened. The prevailing theory is, at least, is that dormant electrical lines that stretch up and over Eaton Canyon, which incidentally is the place that I dropped my 9-year-old son off at camp to go hiking. It's a beautiful, beautiful part of Los Angeles. Dormant power lines were electrified in the windstorm ahead of the fire breaking out in Altadina. And as soon as that spark happened, again, in the same circumstances as in the Palisades - different, but the same - as soon as there was a spark, everything exploded.

And so the question is there, should these big, steel, lattice towers that had been dormant for decades have been there? Why wasn't the power shut off entirely in these super high-voltage power lines? And, you know, again, would it have stopped the scale of the fire if even that was different? And I don't think we know the answer. Remember, the Palisades Fire was a holdover fire from an earlier fire, the Lachman Fire.

MOSLEY: Yes.

SOBOROFF: Which was started by an arsonist...

MOSLEY: Right.

SOBOROFF: ...Seven days prior. And the underground root system of that fire was still burning. I knew nothing about it before I started researching this book and talking to experts.

MOSLEY: That fire could move that way?

SOBOROFF: Underground, yeah.

MOSLEY: Underground. That firefighters could think they had put out a fire, but it is dormant. And it is just - it will spread underground and then resurface.

SOBOROFF: The firebrands is what they're called.

MOSLEY: Right.

SOBOROFF: And they just sit there, these embers. And all it needed, it waited for the wind to blow the thin layer of dirt in the Santa Monica Mountains off the top of it and, you know, for those embers to make contact with the remaining vegetation that was there.

MOSLEY: There's also talk, though, about underground power lines versus aboveground power lines, and sort of this also being an infrastructure issue - that that's an antiquated way for cities to build, having aboveground power lines, because when there're heavy winds, then what do you expect?

SOBOROFF: It was the thing that the firefighters from the Los Angeles County Fire Department over in Altadena told me and I was fascinated to hear, is that during the Palisades Fire, but before the Eaton Fire had broken out, the thing that they were getting called for the most was downed power lines in residential neighborhoods. And, yeah, there are so many above grade, aboveground power lines, utility poles all throughout Los Angeles County. It's the way they used to do it. And I think there's no question today - it's a huge investment, obviously. But there's no question today that undergrounding of those utilities would prevent, you know, similar disasters or at least sparks that could lead to similar disasters in the future.

MOSLEY: Yeah. I want to talk to you a little bit now about the way that we live and what you learned. One shocking thing that stopped you in your tracks - it also stopped me in my tracks - was that 1,000 lithium-ion batteries exploded during these fires. And you write that you even felt some of those explosions yourself as you were covering this. What's happening inside of our homes that firefighters weren't prepared for?

SOBOROFF: I think what's happening outside of our homes, actually, is electric cars are...

MOSLEY: Ah.

SOBOROFF: ...Pretty ubiquitous here in southern California, I think maybe more than anywhere else in the country at this point.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

SOBOROFF: And those electric car batteries were exploding all over the city and all over the county. And I remember specifically being live with Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC and just a concussive blast coming during one of those live reports. And when you look around, you see the cars. You see these electric cars. And it's part of the reason that firefighters said to me - Nick Schuler from Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, he worried in a way he had never before that he'd come out of it with cancer because of the things that burned. And these firefighters knew at the time that when they were having trouble breathing, it was different from being up in the mountains fighting a brush fire.

MOSLEY: When you talk to firefighters after the event, have they talked to you anymore about their fears around that, I mean, the certainty that they will get sick, but they have a job to do? But also, maybe some of the things that they're experiencing physically. Have you gotten any word from them?

SOBOROFF: Yeah. Eric Mendoza (ph) from Station 69 in the heart of the Palisades, which incidentally is the station that, you know, when I think of the color red, I think of the fire trucks from that fire station - going in there as a little boy on, you know, Fire Service Day, where they opened the garage door and allowed, you know, kids like us from the neighborhood inside. He drove back to his house in Acton after the fire and could barely breathe. He described to me racing home on the Friday after the fire started to go see his daughters and his wife and basically collapses the second he crosses the threshold of the house.

And they went to urgent care immediately. He was put on corticosteroids and, you know, his breathing was monitored. And the truth of the matter is, none of us know what the long-term ramifications of that type of immediate exposure will be to those firefighters. But one of the things that we do know is, you know, look at what happened post-9/11.

MOSLEY: 9/11, the terrorist attacks, yeah.

SOBOROFF: Yeah, exactly. I was a freshman at NYU. It was my seventh day of school. And that was - crazy, actually, how I had, you know, almost immediate flashbacks to watching people try to stream out of the Palisades. Bulldozers having to push cars aside in an evacuation from a neighborhood that I hadn't seen since I was, you know, 18 years old, living in New York City. This all is interconnected. Some of the same programs at NIOSH - National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health...

MOSLEY: Yes.

SOBOROFF: ...Part of the federal government that were used to monitor the health and the well-being of the firefighters on the pile after 9/11, and other firefighters in catastrophic events, came under the chopping block of DOGE in the wake of the fire. And that's where misinformation, disinformation, the politics, the politics of natural disasters all sort of converge.

MOSLEY: Our guest today is journalist Jacob Soboroff, a senior political and national correspondent for MS NOW and the author of the new book "Firestorm." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "BLUES FOR LOS ANGELES")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And we're talking with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book, "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires And America's New Age Of Disaster." It's a firsthand account of the deadly wildfires one year ago this month in Los Angeles. Soboroff's book explores what those fires tell us about climate risk, policy failures and the growing era of extreme disasters in the U.S.

The timing of the political firestorm is kind of - it's striking. It makes this natural disaster, in many ways, different than others, because that always happens, but it typically happens post-event. In this instance, you're in the middle of reporting on a fire that's nowhere near contained, and the politics blame has already started. What were you seeing?

SOBOROFF: Donald Trump saying that you could flow water from the Pacific Northwest in order to stop the fires, that the delta smelt - a tiny little fish that's, you know, prevalent up in central and northern California - is the cause of not having enough water in southern California. None of it was true. I mean, literally. It led to him, when he became president a couple of weeks later, releasing billions of gallons of water from a reservoir up there that just flooded fields in the Central Valley in California. It didn't do anything for the people in southern California at all.

I think it just became confusing. Gavin Newsom told me that he had people calling him based on what Donald Trump was saying and doing that were doubting the response of the governor himself. And I'm not absolving him. You know, I mean, all of that is ripe for discussion, too. He told me we're going to have a Marshall Plan 2.0 in the aftermath of the fire to rebuild LA. And I think it's an open question there as to whether or not we've seen that materialize in any, you know, significant way. But it's undoubtedly clear to me that particularly the misinformation and disinformation that was coming from the president-elect and the people around him made fighting these fires if not more specifically difficult in real time, more traumatic for the people that were searching for answers.

MOSLEY: You know, I'm thinking about the gutting of many agencies. I'm thinking about NOAA losing - what is it? - like, almost 1,000 employees and the hemorrhaging of FEMA officials. I think you called it the vacuum of knowledge. What happens? Are you concerned in thinking about the next disaster? And, I mean, it's gutted even more than it was this time last year because of the cuts from the Trump administration.

SOBOROFF: At NOAA in particular, there was something called the billion-dollar disaster registry. And Adam Smith, the former senior researcher, is no longer keeping track of billion-dollar disasters. It had gone back decades. And the reason I'm telling you this is we'll never actually know, unless this is stood back up under a future administration, the full cost, according to the federal government, of the great Los Angeles fires of January 2025.

MOSLEY: We'll never know really, truly.

SOBOROFF: We will never know. And that is because of Adam Smith no longer being there, because of the Trump administration not wanting people that work within NOAA to discuss - literally discuss - climate change. He was informally told verbally to stop basically keeping track of this disaster registry. There's always important conversations about how you can more efficiently spend money in the wake of these disasters. But to allow the exodus of people with so much institutional knowledge, anybody who works there will tell you that it has set the agency back.

And it goes on and on. I mentioned NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, where - centered in Morgantown, West Virginia - the programs that look out for the health and well-being of firefighters in the wake of events like this, study why firefighters die, also was put on the chopping block in all of this. So that is the politics part. And when I say misinformation and disinformation, it's also the curtailing of the release of information...

MOSLEY: Yes.

SOBOROFF: ...Subsequent to these fires. And all of these things will affect that.

MOSLEY: You interviewed Governor Newsom. And when the cameras were off, he told you something that stuck with you, that he was worried about the undocumented community.

SOBOROFF: Yes.

MOSLEY: He was worried because the undocumented community was, of course, impacted by the fires. But they also would be responsible for rebuilding the city.

SOBOROFF: He knew.

MOSLEY: Yeah, yeah. And that fear became a reality.

SOBOROFF: Yeah, you know, I have said before that these types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. And Governor Newsom knew that with the policies of the incoming administration, some of the very people that would be responsible for the cleanup and the rebuilding of Los Angeles may end up in the crosshairs of national immigration policy.

And I think that was an understatement. I mean, he was absolutely right. Pablo Alvarado, in the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, said to me that often the first people into a disaster, the second responders after the first responders after something like this, are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina. And they'd be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time. And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin - and you and I have talked about it before - on the streets of LA as sort of the petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country.

And it's not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots, where workers looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles, has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign. And, you know, people argue that there have been deaths associated directly with this, including a man, a laborer who ran across a highway trying to avoid immigration enforcement and was hit and struck by a car as these federal - masked, armed federal agents started chasing him through Los Angeles.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

SOBOROFF: It's undeniable that the Trump administration policies on immigration have directly affected the people who are called upon in scenarios just like this.

MOSLEY: Have you found any evidence that it's impacted the rebuilding of Altadena and Pacific Palisades?

SOBOROFF: I was just thinking about this. You know, anecdotally, it's hard to say. But, you know, we lost 16,000-plus structures. And I was just looking at the numbers this morning. I think around only 2,500 permits have been issued for the rebuilding in the wake of the fires. We're a year on. And I'm sure, you know, just like the fires themselves, there's no proximate cause for that. But it is hard to imagine that a labor force under, you know, such intense scrutiny and under threat is not part of the equation there with the slow pace of rebuilding in Los Angeles.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Your dad is actually part of the story, too.

SOBOROFF: He is, yeah. He was briefly the chief recovery officer for the city of LA. And like all the other people who got caught up in the sort of slings and arrows of local politics, that was short-lived and became political. It's part of the reason I think I focused the book so much on those two weeks and not the aftermath is that, you know, as a journalist, I want to stay away from the part of the story where, you know, my dad has been in civic life for decades, was involved in the recovery effort briefly. But I remain insanely proud of him, who in his 70s decided, you know, step back into the arena and be a part of the recovery process in the Palisades.

It was a painful part of the story for me, if I'm being honest. But I remain very, very proud of him that he decided to step in, and for those 90 days, you know, did everything he could to be involved in the rebuilding of the park. And move the Palisades high school over to the Sears building. And find a place for debris removal with the Army Corps. But I'll let another journalist look into the recovery and the aftermath to see, you know, ultimately to write the history of that part of the story.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book, "Firestorm," which chronicles the devastating Los Angeles wildfires and what they reveal about America's new age of disaster. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking to journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book, "Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires And America's New Age Of Disaster."

Can you describe, when you drive through the Palisades and Altadena, what it looks like today?

SOBOROFF: They both look like very big construction sites, in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings. In the Palisades, there's a central business district. The building was 100 years old when the fire hit, and the outside of it is still standing. But mostly it's just empty lots. And in Altadena same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside of it is still there. But it's a patchwork of empty lots, homes now under construction, and lots and lots of workers.

And I don't think you can really fully understand that part of the story about those second responders, those workers, until you drive through the community and you see that they're virtually the only people that are in these communities during the daylight hours. There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena. But for the most part, these are communities where you've got workers going in during the day and coming out at night. And that's the life, actually, that you're seeing when you're there today, is the people who are working on the rebuilding.

MOSLEY: What can you tell us about rebuilding efforts in both of those areas, where you grew up and in Altadena?

SOBOROFF: It's hard to see, honestly. I was in both Palisades and Altadena this week, and the pace is slow. And it's sort of a hopscotch of development. And I think for people who do come back, for people who can afford to come back, it's going to be a long road ahead. You're going to have half the houses on your street under construction for years to come. And for people that do inhabit those homes, it's going to be an isolating experience. But there's an effort underway to rebuild.

And, you know, the Palisades has a house now that people are living in again. It was the first house that was rebuilt on McNally Avenue in Altadena. I walked there earlier this week, and there's a house down at the end of the block. But there's also a lot of for-sale signs. And that's the sad reality of this is that there are people who - whether it's that they can't afford to come back in the most unaffordable city, or one of them, in the country, or that they can't stomach it, I think, sadly, a lot of people are not going to be returning to their homes.

MOSLEY: I mean, the economic disparity is the thing that we see the most, right? If you can afford it, you will build back in those areas. The challenge is, especially for Altadena, that community was just about wiped out. And that generational wealth has been wiped out. And the headaches and challenges of things like insurance, which your brother dealt with.

SOBOROFF: That's right.

MOSLEY: You had a firsthand account of that.

SOBOROFF: Well, you know, I think one of the challenges is for people like him and my sister-in-law, who were living with their in-laws at the time, and they lost that house. But the house they were about to move into with their new baby didn't burn, but the damage was significant. And I think that that's sort of an insurance nightmare that so many people, I think, are finding now in Los Angeles, which is, they survived the firestorm. Their home is still standing. But both questions about insurance and what it'll pay for and what it won't pay for, and whether or not it's safe.

Tony Briscoe for the LA Times has done some amazing reporting - I spent some time with him the other day - about toxic substances that weren't tested for in the wake of the fire. And I can just tell you from my brother directly, it's one of the things that he's most concerned about moving back to the Palisades with his young daughter. Is the air going to be safe to breathe as there's construction happening all around your home, kicking up the soil that may or may not still have toxic contamination?

MOSLEY: I was wondering, though, on the way we live. Is there a particular way that modern communities are built that make disasters like this worse?

SOBOROFF: The speech that I'll think about, and I think ends the book in the final chapter, is Anthony Marrone, who's the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. And he talked about how the first peoples, the Natives, in the Los Angeles area used fire and weren't afraid of it. And the landscape was managed before modern Los Angeles was modern Los Angeles. And now the conversations we have are, you know, should the city pay for brush clearance around my mansion in the mountains? You know, what type of defensible space should we have around homes by, you know, local statute or regulation? You know, all these things are important. But the reality is - and go back and watch "Design For Disaster," a documentary made in 1960s about the historic Bel Air Fire in Los Angeles - we have designed this community to be one that's in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced, and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody's packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. You know, people may not return to their communities after they've lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the Wildland-Urban interface in the second largest city in the country.

MOSLEY: There's something very specific about the way that you wrote this book because it is a two-week account. It's very journalistic. Of course, you know, it's also a little memoir-ish (ph) in nature because we're learning about you and growing up and the people you grew up around. But there's something specific about you chronicling your two weeks of reporting at a time when belief in traditional journalism might just be at an all-time low.

SOBOROFF: Rock bottom. Yeah.

MOSLEY: Yeah. Is that something that you were thinking about and the reasoning on why you wanted to write a book? Because your journalism is still out there. It stands on its own, but there's something very specific about putting it all in a book in this way.

SOBOROFF: I wanted people to understand that I'm - you might see me on TV. I've had the good fortune of being able to experience all of these things as a reporter, but I also experienced them as a human being, too. And in the moment, when you're on television, it's really hard to share that experience with anybody other than your immediate family. And frankly, I wasn't doing a very good job of sharing what all these things were doing to me, even with them.

MOSLEY: I also wonder, as a national reporter, how you hold all of it because at a certain point, it does become a local story. It's a national story, and you're doing all the live shots and the big headlines. And then the fire is out, and you have to move on. But you haven't moved on because this is your community. These are your people.

SOBOROFF: It turns out that this is the most important assignment that I've ever had to cover for me, personally. I don't think I realized at the time how badly I needed the connections that I've made in the wake of the fire, both with the people who have lost homes and the firefighters, first responders who were out there, but also, honestly, with my own family - my immediate family, my wife and my kids, my mom and my dad and my siblings and myself. I think that this was a really hard year in LA. And I think in the wake of the fire, I was experiencing some level of despair, as well. And then the ICE raids happened here and...

MOSLEY: Yes.

SOBOROFF: ...Sort of turned our city upside-down. And this book, for me, was just this amazing cathartic blessing of an opportunity to find community with people I don't think I ever would have otherwise spent time with and to reconnect with people who I hadn't seen or heard from in forever. I - you know, for a guy who was sitting around the campfire telling his friend Sam that stupid jacket, the yellow jacket, no way. Never. I'm so glad I went - it was in my storage unit, is the truth. I didn't have one handy. I had to borrow somebody else's. But...

MOSLEY: Which I couldn't believe. I'm like, you don't have that in the trunk of your car?

SOBOROFF: (Laughter) So grateful. They had an extra one, and that I got to rush out.

MOSLEY: I mean, you were so sure you weren't going to be covering fires that you put in your storage unit.

SOBOROFF: It was humbling. And I was cocky about it. And, frankly, I was an idiot. It's in my car now, and I will never not have it in my car again. The experience of doing this is something that I don't wish on anybody, but in a way, I wish everybody could experience. It's given insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally, were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. When all else failed, literally emergency alerts that resulted in a lot of people dying, I think, is the argument that many people make, local news was telling you what streets and what corners were accessible and not, what homes were on fire, talking to people by their first names. It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else.

MOSLEY: Jacob Soboroff, thank you so much for this conversation and for your book.

SOBOROFF: Tonya, thank you, as always. So good to see you.

MOSLEY: Jacob Soboroff, correspondent for MS Now. His new book is titled "Firestorm." Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Ben Markovits' novel, "The Rest Of Our Lives." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE DAVE BURBECK QUARTET'S "UNSQUARE DANCE")

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Ben Markovits' novel, "The Rest Of Our Lives," was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and has just been published here in the U.S. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, says it's the perfect little literary novel to curl up with, especially if winter weather has you feeling cooped up.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Tom Layward, the narrator and main character of Ben Markovits' new novel, "The Rest Of Our Lives," introduces himself in a curious way. On the very first page of the book, he talks matter-of-factly about the affair his wife Amy had 12 years ago, when their two kids were young. Amy, who's Jewish, got involved at a local synagogue in Westchester. Tom, who was raised Catholic and clearly not a joiner, remained on the sidelines. At the synagogue, Amy met Zach Zirsky, who Tom describes as the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at a bar mitzvah so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain.

After the affair came out, Tom and Amy decided to stay together for the kids, a boy named Michael and his younger sister, Miriam. But Tom tells us, I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college, you can leave, too. The deal, Tom says, help me get through the first few months when we had to pretend that everything was fine.

Twelve years have since passed, and the marriage has settled back into a state of OK-ness. Miriam, now 18, is starting college in Pittsburgh, and because Amy is having a tough time with Miriam's departure, Tom alone drives her to campus. And once Tom drops Miriam off, he just keeps driving westward without explanation to us or to himself, as though he's a passenger in a driverless car that has decided to carry him across the mighty Allegheny and keep on going.

The three-page scene here where Tom passively melds into the transcontinental traffic flow constitutes a master class on how to write about a character who is opaque to himself. You don't feel anything about anything, Amy says early on to Tom, an accusation that's pretty much echoed by Tom's old college girlfriend, Jill, whom he spontaneously drops in on at her home in Las Vegas after being out of touch for roughly 30 years.

But if Tom is distanced from his own feelings and vague about the issue he had with a couple of students that forced him to take a leave from teaching in law school, he's a sharp diagnostician of other people's behavior. What fuels this road trip is Tom's voice, by turns wry, mournful and oh so casually astute.

There's a strain of Richard Ford and John Updike in Tom's tone, which I mean as a high compliment. Take, for instance, how Tom chats to us readers about a married couple who are old friends of his and Amy's. Chrissie was maybe one of those women who derive secret energy from the troubles of her friends. Her husband, Dick, was a perfectly good guy, about 6'2", fat and healthy. He worked for an online tech platform. I really don't know what he did. So might most of us be summed up for posterity.

As Tom racks up miles, taking detours to visit other folks out of his past, like his semi-estranged brother, his meandering road trip accrues in suspense. There's something else he's subconsciously speeding away from here besides his marriage. Tom tells us at the outset that he's suffering from symptoms his doctors ascribe to long COVID - dizziness and morning face swelling so severe that daughter Miriam jokingly calls him Puff Daddy. Shortly after he reaches the Pacific, Tom also lands in the hospital. Getting out of the hospital, Tom dryly comments, is like escaping a casino. They don't make it easy for you.

The canon of road trip stories in American literature is vast, even more so if you count other modes of transportation besides cars, like, say, rafts. But the most memorable road trips, like the rest of our lives, notice the easy-to-miss signposts marking life forks in the road and looming mortality that make the journey itself everything.

MOSLEY: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.

On tomorrow's show, Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Trump's most loyal supporters, now labeled a traitor by him, has resigned from Congress. We speak with New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea. He's written a profile on Green. I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. Our FRESH AIR executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Anna Bauman, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

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