Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster – A Bestselling Personal Memoir From the Front Lines of an Unfolding Catastrophe

On January 7, 2025, national reporter Jacob Soboroff received an evacuation text from his brother as the Palisades Fire engulfed the hillside behind his family's home in Los Angeles. Soboroff rushed to cover the story, becoming a frontline reporter for NBC News as the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire in Altadena consumed the region. He interviewed displaced residents, met with workers, and pressed Governor Gavin Newsom on Meet the Press. After the fires were controlled, Soboroff undertook months of reporting with firefighters, fire victims, political leaders, academics, earth scientists, wildlife biologists, and meteorologists to understand what had occurred and what it meant for the future. He came to view the 2025 LA fires not as an isolated tragedy, but as a harbinger of America's new age of disaster—what one senior emergency-management official called "the fire of the future." Firestorm documents the costliest wildfire in American history, the people affected by it, and one journalist's personal connection to covering his hometown's destruction. The book examines why understanding how Los Angeles burned is essential to comprehending the disasters yet to come.