When the Palisades Fire ignites in January 2025, it doesn’t just burn through hillside brush, it tears into the heart of Los Angeles. In Firestorm, NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff returns to the neighborhood where he grew up to cover a catastrophe that moves faster than evacuation routes, faster than the helicopters can fly, and faster than the systems meant to protect a city.
What begins as a smoldering remnant of an earlier blaze becomes a chain reaction: hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, bone-dry air, collapsing infrastructure, and a second major fire sparked miles away. Soboroff blends gripping frontline reporting with a deeper investigation into what these fires reveal about “America’s New Age of Disaster,” where climate extremes collide with aging systems and misinformation spreads as quickly as embers.
This is a story of firefighters and families, politics and recovery, and the unsettling question: what happens when “fire season” becomes “fire year”?
