FIRESTORM

A first-to-market account of the Los Angeles fires of 2025.

Soboroff, an MS NOW correspondent, posits that the seven conflagrations that devastated his hometown in the winter of 2025 are but a link in a growing chain that he dubs “America’s New Age of Disaster.” Their origin lies in the buried ember of a previous wildfire that had smoldered for a week above Pacific Palisades, the result of errant New Year’s fireworks, and was kicked up by the howling Santa Ana winds, yielding “a massive wall of flames and heat so intense that we’d need to turn around,” one hot enough to melt automobiles. Hours later, another fire erupted in Altadena, across the county. Where the first fire call demanded 30 to 50 fire trucks, the combined blazes were simply more than the thousands of assembled firefighters could handle. It’s surprising to learn from Soboroff’s account that none of this came as a surprise at all to fire forecasters, who the day before had issued a warning about a “life-threatening windstorm” that had all the right ingredients for destruction: wind, downed power lines, and plenty of flammable material in the mountains that interleave through the metro area. There’s a touch too much Soboroff, as participant, in his narrative, understandable given his personal connection to destroyed places but also sometimes distracting. Better is his broad sourcing of accounts, from firefighters and government officials to those who suffered loss to the tune of billions of dollars. But we may never know the true cost of the fires: According to Soboroff, the Trump administration has suppressed data about the fires, with its “efforts…to refute, dismantle, or outright eliminate valuable resources within the federal government’s arsenal to communicate about, respond to, mitigate, and prevent disasters.” Add that, then, to the causes of future calamity.

A near-real-time overview of a catastrophic blaze, among the worst in California history.