This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemitabasu.

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 Soberoff, 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,

why fires like this are likely to keep happening,

and why just over a year later the work of recovery is far from over.

I think that there is a profound sense of trauma and grieving that's still going on.

What was lost is incalculable.

Two entire communities in the most populous county in the country are gone.

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