Name: It's Not A Sci-Fi Thriller, It's The Future We All Face - Jacob Soboroff On "Firestorm"
Uploaded: 2026-01-31T16:59:51.000Z
Duration: 3 min 59 s
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We're here with the author of Firestorm, Jacob Soborough.

You were here a year ago to talk about the wildfires in your hometown of Pacific Palisades.

This is you very close to your childhood home.

And now, as I said earlier, you have the new book, Firestorm the Great Los Angeles Fires in America's New Age of Disaster.

What perspective has this last year given you on what happened and what the future might be for that area?

When I was covering the Palisades burning down, and

we should also mention Altadena, you know, dozens of miles away on the other side of town, I thought I was looking into my past.

Watching my childhood neighborhood carbonized before my eyes, watching my home that I grew up in until I was five, incinerate.

But it turns out, I think what I have learned is that what I was looking at was the fire of the future, not a look into my past.

And I think when you read the book, it reads in some ways like almost like a sci fi thriller, but

it is the lived, real experience, not just of Angelenos, but

of so many people around the country and around the world who are going to experience natural disasters like this.

And again, as I look at the image on the COVID of this book, which is so extraordinary, and

this was all over Los Angeles, all over the area, it was this extreme everywhere.

Where the fire hit, remind us now, a year later, because I think we've lost perspective on this.

31 people died as a direct result of the flames.

They say maybe 400 with excess mortality.

You know, not the direct connection to the fires themselves.

Three times the size of Manhattan burned in the largest, most populous county in the United States of America.

And again, two distinct neighborhoods entirely wiped off the map.

More historically diverse, working class.

So 16,000 structures burned down a year later.

And I think, you know, one of the things you read in the book is that whether it's immigration or covering these fires, mass casualty events, the fissures underneath society become so obvious.

Louisiana is the most unaffordable city and the most unaffordable state in the country.

And people who want to build back 40% of the homes that are selling.

The lots are being sold to corporations now, not to Californians.

The premiums are going up, and people don't have enough money just from their jobs.

And so they're going to have to find a life elsewhere outside of Los Angeles.

And this is a book about people as much as it is about politics or climate change, all of those things.

And you read about people like engineers.

300 engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory Caltech lost their homes in Altadena.

You'll read about people like Kate Hennigan, extraordinary JPL senior engineer, or Herman Lloyda Wilson, her neighbor on McNally Avenue.

They worked at UPS for 36 years, fell in love, and

have had to move 10 times, 10 times since the fire because they can't afford to stay in their home.

But I found so much just like, just like with being on the streets at the immigration protests, so much inspiration from the people that are coming back from these fires because they really, you know, they're not taking no for an answer.

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It's Not A Sci-Fi Thriller, It's The Future We All Face - Jacob Soboroff On "Firestorm"

perspective

extraordinary

obvious

enormous