This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shamita Basu.
Today, the lasting impact of the Los Angeles fires.
On January 7th of 2025,
Los Angeles County experienced the most destructive series of fires it had ever seen.
You know, I can close my eyes and remember what it felt like to see embers falling like rain,
sometimes horizontally in all directions.
That's Jacob Soboroff, a senior reporter at MS Now in Los Angeles.
He was working that day at the NBC studio when the fires broke out.
Jacob grew up in the Palisades, and when he heard that the neighborhood was ablaze,
he set out to cover the fires there.
I looked over at Will Rogers State Historic Park and knew that over that ridge,
my entire Childhood was on fire.
Jacob spent the next several days on the ground reporting live on the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire.
Together, they burned for over three weeks and decimated over 16,000 homes and buildings,
including the home where Jacob grew up.
31 people died from their injuries and hundreds more deaths are being attributed to smoke inhalation and other conditions.
Now Jacob is out with a new book called Firestorm,
the Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster.
It's a harrowing real-time account of what happened,