The following is excerpted from “FIRESTORM: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster,” by Jacob Soboroff. Copyright © 2026 by Jacob Soboroff. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
Jake Levine, the Special Assistant to President Biden and my high school carpool passenger from the Palisades, had made it back to Washington, D.C., and was preparing for a big day at the White House. He was about to walk into an important meeting — one of his final official duties of the administration — about Ukraine. But his mind was on the Palisades as he texted me to say that he thought his mom’s house on El Medio was still standing, based on what he had seen on social media.
“Send me the address,” I wrote back, thinking I would try to get there after the Today show. It was around six thirty in the morning.
Levine did, then put his phone into a cabinet outside of a SCIF, a sensitive compartmentalized information facility, inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds. The equivalent of the Situation Room in the White House, no electronic devices would be permitted due to the sensitive nature of the intelligence discussed inside.
As he and other high level officials discussed Ukraine, the sun rose over the Palisades, or over the smoke and haze blanketing the Palisades, at seven o’clock on the dot. Bianca and I had retreated to our Jeep again. When it was clear that the sky would provide us enough light to look around and that the dark, thick cloud of smoke wasn’t going to be permanent, an adrenaline jolt or momentary flush of hope shot through my nervous system. I had to see what the Palisades looked like in daylight.
By 7:37 a.m., we were driving down Sunset into the village in our Wagoneer, which now smelled as if someone had smoked about 5,000 cigarettes inside of it. I was at the wheel and had my head cocked to the south side of the street. In some places, remarkably, I could see the normal shade of grey the sky is at this hour just off the Pacific coast. Columns of darker grey smoke still rose above us. Not every house had burned — there were several still standing.
“Look at how that one house survived. Wow.”
Winds were still whipping trees around.
“This one survived,” I said a couple of doors down. “It’s crazy.”
For a moment, we sat in silence, absorbing the fact that there was virtually nothing left. On my left was a home still on fire, but on my right was Sixty-Nines — still standing.
“The fire station survived.”
We passed an engine from Elevens that was sitting in the middle of the soaking- wet road, evidence of the overnight battle waged to save the station.
“Everything around it burned. Everything. Around. It. Burned.”
My brother and his wife suspected that her parents’ home, where they had been staying and had evacuated from, had burned down. But the fate of the house they had recently bought and were renovating ahead of the birth of their daughter was less clear — just down the canyon at the bottom of Bienveneda Avenue, on a side street. I told them I would take a look if we could get there, and Bianca agreed to accompany me.
As I drove, I texted my family chat about what survived — and what didn’t.
Pali burned
The HS
KI is good
KI was our temple, Kehillat Israel, which had survived. The high school hadn’t entirely, but buildings on its perimeter had.
The Presbyterian church that Eric Mendoza and Sixty-Nines had tried to save had not. It took us around two minutes to get there from the fire station, and when we turned right onto Bienveneda, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to drive the additional several blocks to my brother’s house because power lines were down. I told Bianca that I was going to get out and run up the hill — and if she didn’t hear from me in a few minutes to come find me. Smoke billowed from the direction of his home.
I started jogging up the street, the first time I had done any — thing other than walk slowly or sit in the car or stand around since our coverage began. I didn’t need to run, but my body told me to do it. Trotting up the hill, I could see the thick smoke of an active fire, and to the left a crack of blue sky — the first I had seen. As I approached the small single- story home that was tucked behind a flesh-pink fence covered in vines and bougainvillea, my eyes first darted to what was happening across the street. Their neighbor’s home was fully engulfed in fire — explosive flames leaped off the house — as if it had ignited in the time we had been driving there.
Flames were absolutely ripping through the structure, and rising from the ground were blackened trees and the wood frame of whatever once stood there. That was it.
But across the street was my brother’s house, seemingly untouched. The hedges. The wall. The curb. The wind wasn’t done with their street yet, though. Knowing that Bianca was waiting for me, I snapped a couple of photos, turned around, and ran back to meet her.
“It’s still there!” I told her. I texted my family chat with the pictures.
Your house still standing guys but house across the street burning bad
Pray for wind to push away
As I reported back on my family text chain, KNBC, which had been on the air for twenty hours straight without commercial interruption, returned to its news crew on the scene. Reporter Michelle Valles was about three miles to the east of where Twelves was fighting to save homes and their station itself. Firefighter Gunner Alves was on the pitched roof of the station in an hours-long battle, while a fellow firefighter released a horse from the neighboring property. Valles was watching a similar scene, as neighbors used garden hoses to put out whatever they could — with photojournalist Joel Cooke continuing to pitch in. A resident named Mike Rodgers stood in the doorway of his home wearing a Chicago Bears beanie, his eyeglasses folded and hanging from his shirt. When Valles asked him what he needed, Rodgers looked across the street, hands on his hips, and paused.
“I could use a cup of coffee.”
The home across the street was completely engulfed.
“We’re just trying to save what we have.”
“What made you come back home?” Valles asked about why the Rodgers family returned after having evacuated the night before.
“This is home, what are we going to do?” he replied. “Where are we going to go?”
A neighbor climbed onto his roof clutching a garden hose, silhouetted by the rising sun and smoke behind him. The water pressure was visibly low, though, a mere trickle coming out of the nozzle in his hand.
A rescue fire truck from Los Angeles County Station No. 111 — dispatched from Valencia, a neighborhood in Santa Clarita, forty miles to the north — drove down the street without stopping, looking for the next place they could continue their fight as the wind shifted from the southwest to the northeast.
Mike and Jenny Rodgers crossed the street, doing what they could to fight the flames as they began to encroach on another house.
“Neighbors helping neighbors. Doing what they can,” Valles said.
From my brother and sister-in-law’s would- be future home, we started back toward our crew, but first I had another stop to make. Jake and Cara Levine had lived on El Medio, just above Pali High, and I took the exact same drive I had hundreds of times to their mom’s place: left off Bienveneda to Sunset. Follow the winding curves just under a mile and a half to their turnoff.
The morning weather was similar, chilly and overcast, as so many of those carpool pickups were. Different this time were the downed power lines. The soaked streets from hydrants run dry. The fire trucks parked in the middle of Sunset. And the burning, still happening on both sides of the street.
At El Medio, we made a right, across from the shell of the church Sixty-Nines couldn’t save. As we drove down the street, I remembered the sounds of the Dave Matthews Band, Barenaked Ladies, and Simon & Garfunkel that I would listen to until my passengers would make me put in a new CD (don’t judge me). I never remembered the Levines’ address because I knew the house. Didn’t need to know the numbers. But as I rolled down the street, so many of them were gone that I could see all the way down into Temescal Canyon, where Pali High was, over the smoldering ruins of so many homes.
I tracked the numbers on the curb, and when I got close, I realized it wasn’t looking good. I pulled up to their house, and on my left all that was left was a chimney, their mom’s burned-out car, and pockets of smoke rising from remnants of their beautiful home. Palm fronds charred to a crisp lined the gutter in front of the house. Their neighbors’ homes were gone, too. It was 7:47 a.m. I took a photo, but there was no cell service, so I turned around and drove back toward Sunset. The message went through at 7:54 a.m., when I had enough cell signal back at our broadcast location to get it through.
Levine was still inside the SCIF without his phone, which allowed his anxiety about what was happening in his hometown to fade to the background as he focused on optimistic feelings about his work on Ukraine, and, later in the day, tackling the process of closing out his work with the administration. At 11 a.m. Eastern time — 8 a.m. in Los Angeles — Jake walked out of the secure room and with others went to the cabinet to grab his phone.
A colleague approached him with a question. Just then, he looked down to see my message.
Call me
House is gone. So sorry
Levine’s mind went immediately blank.
“I’m so sorry. I have to go.”
He left the White House at once, went home to pack his bag, and went to the airport to fly back to Los Angeles.
At almost the same time I was texting with him at the White House, I received a call from a member of the incoming Trump administration. It was like seeing a ghost.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Katie Miller.”
Or, as I first knew her, Katie Waldman — one of the lower-level spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration. Waldman is now Katie Miller after marrying Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s most trusted aides and masterminds of his immigrant family separation policy. She had worked closely with me to allow access inside the detention centers to see the policy in action for myself when I covered it in 2018.
I was shocked. I could not believe I was hearing from her. I couldn’t understand why. I wrote about her in my first book, and when the details of conversations we had about the policy — and her feelings about it — were published, she cut off all contact with me.
I’m not even sure if it fully registered that she was on the phone. The last time I had reached out to her, in March 2023, I never heard back. Now, I didn’t have time to focus on what she might want.
I told her I had to call her back right as Lester Holt began an NBC News special report — breaking into local programming — to televise a news conference of local officials who were going to report on the latest details of the multiple blazes burning throughout Southern California.
Three notes in the key of G played into my earpiece — G, E, and C — to identify the National Broadcasting Company— the same chimes played since November 29, 1929.
“This is an NBC News special report,” the announcer declared over the musical fanfare that signaled — especially to me as a kid growing up in the Palisades — something big was about to be announced. “Here’s Lester Holt.” We had been told to get in position to talk to Lester after the officials had wrapped up their remarks, so I stood at attention in front of the camera, back where the homes continued to burn on Pampas Ricas. Lester quickly threw to the news conference.
Anthony Marrone, the chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, surrounded by a phalanx of the city and county’s top officials — save Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s mayor, who was still en route back from Ghana — updated the latest statistics about the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Finger pointing had already begun about how the mayor could be absent given the warnings issued, and her office insisted (and continued to after the fires) the mayor herself was not aware of the level of danger the city faced because it was not communicated to her by Kristin Crowley, her fire chief, something Crowley later denied.
With Crowley by his side, Marrone said the Palisades Fire was “well over five thousand acres that have burned, and the fire is growing. We have no percentage of containment. We have an estimated one thousand structures destroyed. And also no reported fatalities and a high number of significant injuries to residents who did not evacuate in addition to first responders who were on the fire line.” At the same time, a thousand personnel were still fighting the blaze.
The Eaton Fire had claimed over two thousand acres, he said, noting, “The fire continues to grow with zero percent containment. We have over five hundred personnel assigned, and, unfortunately, we have two reported fatalities to civilians — unknown cause at this time — and we do have a number of significant injuries. We have over a hundred structures destroyed, and the cause of the fire is unknown and under investigation.”
As I listened, I couldn’t get the call from Katie Miller out of my head.
What does she want?
I looked down at my phone to see a text message from her. She was asking if I knew whether a specific street in the Palisades had burned down. Then she sent an address. I couldn’t imagine whose it might be. But I had to focus on what officials were saying, and what I was about to say on national television. As Los Angeles officials held their press conference, Jake Torres and the Los Angeles County firefighters of Nineteens rolled back up to Loma Alta Drive and Fair Oaks Avenue in Altadena, where they had responded to a wires- down call at three o’clock the previous day, before the Eaton Fire broke out. Torres’s engine needed gas, and they were in the area to top off the tank. When he was here last, the intersection was a mess, with utility poles and wires blocking the way until they were able to secure them. Another firefighter on the engine stopped him because she noticed that they were back where they had been the day prior. “Do you remember being on the wires down on this corner yesterday?” Torres realized where they were. But instead of pine trees and the corner park and the small, beautiful homes with the bus stop off to the side, there was nothing. Everything had burned. His fight-or-flight adrenaline still pumping, he allowed himself a moment to absorb what had happened. Oh my God. As they continued through the neighborhood, every single house for what seemed like a mile was on fire. Even if we have all the water in the world, we’re not stopping that. But Nineteens kept going, rolling through Altadena to look for any human or structure they could save. *** For around 20 minutes, I stood ready to join Lester, listening to official after official come to the podium. But I could not stop thinking about the address Katie Miller sent, and who it belonged to. Stephen Miller, her husband, grew up in Santa Monica, just down Pacific Coast Highway from the Palisades. Katie, who went on to become Vice President Mike Pence’s spokesperson before publicly falling out with him in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, had been announced in late December as an incoming administration staff member at Elon Musk’s stated effort to slash waste from the government. “Katie Miller will soon be joining DOGE!” President-elect Trump wrote. “She has been a loyal supporter of mine for many years, and will bring her professional experience to Government Efficiency.” As I waited to join Lester, I wrote back. “Sorry to hang up so fast about to go up on a special report will call you after I get over there,” I texted. “It’s Stephen’s parents’ house. Thank you so much,” she wrote back. “You’re the only one who I can see is there. They are desperate to know.” Is this really happening? Am I being asked to go to Stephen Miller’s parents’ house? I was. “I’ll find out. Been doing for others too. My brother’s house about to burn down,” I said. “So sad.” She asked if most of the streets around where she told me the Millers’ home was had burned. “Yes most . . . gone.” “When do you think you’d get to theirs. They are hopeful but I think unlikely. Thanks so much. It’s so terrible. It’s their whole life.” I could not believe it. But I didn’t have time to process. I joined Lester on the special report, this time with my mask and goggles both on, as the wind had shifted again, and choking smoke was making it hard to breathe — or even to see as it infiltrated my goggles. After I gave Lester, who spends a considerable amount of time in Los Angeles and is from Northern California, the state of play on the ground, he added his own view of what was playing out across the country from the studio he sat in. “Yeah, Jacob, I have been covering wildfires in Northern and Southern California since the earliest days of my career, going back into the late seventies. I have never seen anything like this. Do you agree?” “There’s no doubt about it. L.A. is a city of communities, Lester — you know this as well as anyone from the time that you have spent here. And Pacific Palisades is one of those communities. Pacific Palisades, for all intents and purposes, has been wiped off the map as we know it.” Lester thanked me, and I took out my earpiece. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Katie Miller had called about. So I drove to Stephen Miller’s parents’ house almost immediately, pulling up in front of their home at 8:37 a.m. There was nothing left. Homes up and down the block had burned down, including the Millers’. Their black automatic gate had been left open. Only the three-foot wall covered with vines and the numbers marking their address was left, along with some of the succulents planted on the curb. I could see clear through several blocks toward Sunset. There was nothing but two steel beams that rose from the rubble of the home. Whatever it looked like two days prior, I had no idea. I sent her an image, just as I had to Jake Levine, followed by several messages. [Whole] neighborhood is gone I’m sorry Seriously if any message you want me to convey from PEOTUS lmk Sorry you’re going through this PEOTUS, President-Elect of the United States. “I am so sad for them,” she replied. “Me too. Sorry again.” “Thank you for going there.” “Palisades is stronger than politics in my book,” I wrote, with the belief that our at times adversarial journalist-source relationship could be set aside, at least in the moment. I added a red heart emoji. This is all so surreal, I thought to myself. For a moment, I’d considered not reaching out further — but the moment called for an olive branch. Maybe it was her offering me one? I decided to call her, and did on FaceTime at 8:45 in the morning as I drove down Chautauqua toward a facility on the beach that was doubling as the makeshift gas station Tim Larson from Twenty-Threes filled up at overnight. Katie picked up. She had the flu, she told me. We talked a little about Stephen’s parents, and their invaluable sentimental possessions that were in the house, including paintings by his grandmother. I found myself feeling awful for them, and her family. We were all going through something similarly gutting — losing so much of what makes us who we are. The call lasted less than a minute, and we hung up after expressing the same sympathies we had over text. For a minute, it felt as though our bad blood had been left aside. We had that conversation before I saw what, minutes before she and I had FaceTimed, her once-and-future boss sent out as his first message about the fires on his social media platform. It was a message filled with misinformation about the cause of the fires and what Trump said was a potential solution to it: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” At 8:53 a.m., Katie Miller’s current boss, Elon Musk, shared it to his hundreds of millions of followers on X, a post reshared over fifty thousand times and seen by as many as 38 million people. I wondered if he knew about the Millers’ home. None of the misinformation he was sharing would have saved it. Instead, it would seep into the collective consciousness of people across the world like the toxins that were seeping into the bodies of so many of us in the Palisades and Altadena.
Jacob Soboroff is a senior political and national correspondent for MS NOW. Recommended
