At the intersection of Midwick Drive and Sinaloa Avenue in Altadena, neighbors had mobilized to stop a situation almost exactly the same as I had seen playing out across the street from my brother’s home in the Palisades. Flames from a house, fully engulfed, were pouring up and over the fence toward the home of Eric Fiedler and his son Christopher, which had survived the fire that night. With two garden hoses and a ladder, they climbed to the roof to attempt to beat back the flames by wetting the roof and the hedges. It was 9:25 a.m.
One resident who was wearing a cutoff black T-shirt and sunglasses used the shirt to cover his mouth to prevent smoke from asphyxiating him. A fire truck from Riverside County Cal Fire pulled up, resulting in the exalted screams of even the KNBC reporter on the scene, Michelle Valles.
“Thank you so much! Oh, my goodness. Praise the Lord.”
Around the same time the Riverside County firefighters battled the flames on Sinaloa, Ashley, the daughter of Herb and Loyda Wilson, was heading back toward their house two miles away after evacuating for the night to see if McNally Avenue had survived. By the time she and her boyfriend got close, she knew it wasn’t good. She called her parents, in Hawaii, inconsolable.
“It’s gone, Dad! Everything is gone!”
“Relax,” Herb told his daughter in the Hawaiian darkness. “It’s going to be OK.”
Cate Heneghan had been receiving reports from her neighbors, too. One of them, who grew up in the home she still lived in on McNally Avenue, had tried to get close around six in the morning. But she told Cate that when she drove past Fairoaks Burger, less than a tenth of a mile away and just around the corner, all she saw was flames.
Cate attempted to get back to the block as well, but when she was within a half mile, she thought better of it.
I don’t want to be part of the problem. I know it’s gone. It’s gone, Cate. Just let it go.
Even though she saw homes just a few blocks away that were still standing, her gut told her to turn around, so she did.
Nick Schuler of Cal Fire, the state fire agency, had a thought run through his head he had never experienced in all of his years of fighting fires.
God, I hope I don’t die of cancer. This is not a good place to be. Thousands of homes have burned.
He was in the smoldering heart of the Palisades. He and Governor Newsom were driving through the area after a morning fire briefing, trying to find a cell signal for Newsom to reach President Biden. My damn cell phone, the governor thought. He had initiated the call because he was going to elevate the asks about resources, personnel, equipment, and federal reimbursements for what people were already saying could potentially be the costliest natural disaster in American history.
As the fire continued to rage both in the neighborhoods and on the ridges of the Santa Monica Mountains, the governor directed his security detail to pull over.
“Guys, turn left. Just stop. Stop.”
He checked the bars on his cell phone.
“No. Jesus Christ.”
He couldn’t get a signal.
“You know, get near the gas station—it worked there last night.”
At 9:41 a.m. we came across Governor Newsom and Schuler outside that gas station. Newsom had declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after the Palisades Fire broke out, and with it deployed hundreds of members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles. Once the Eaton Fire ignited, he knew that a major disaster declaration was needed—and had to be requested of President Biden, who was still in town—in order to mobilize federal resources for the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, and Woodley Fires, now burning. The Hurst Fire had broken out Tuesday night and was growing in size in the north San Fernando Valley, surpassing five hundred acres Wednesday morning. Smoke plumes were rising from all corners of Los Angeles County. The Woodley fire started early Wednesday, a few dozen acre blaze in the Sepulveda Basin.
Like Schuler, I, too, was aware but perhaps not so acutely that our surroundings were not good for our health. My head was pounding. But I wanted to see my house and the rest of my community to understand, in the light of day, what was left and what wasn’t. As we drove past the 76 gas station at Via de la Paz and Sunset, I saw multiple black SUVs with flashing lights on the side of the road, across from what used to be Jacopo’s Pizza—burned to the ground—and directly next to the Gelson’s supermarket, also gone. Tactical agents with long rifles were standing next to the motorcade. I knew the president was in town, but I assumed it was Governor Newsom because of the size of the detail. We pulled over, and I got out and walked toward the vehicles.
The governor, sitting in the right rear passenger seat, had his window cracked open, and a phone pressed to his ear. I had interviewed or run into Newsom multiple times—during the failed recall effort against him in 2021, on the floor of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and elsewhere—and he had told me he followed my reporting on immigration closely during the first Trump term. I felt comfortable approaching the car—something his advance team, staff, and guys with long rifles didn’t seem to appreciate.
The governor and I made eye contact. Holding his hand over the receiver and pointing to the phone, he mouthed to me, “I’m talking to Biden. I can’t talk.” I can be pushy, but I knew enough to walk away, giving him the space to speak with the president. I hoped for an interview when he was off the phone.
It was a bit of a fib by Newsom. He hadn’t yet gotten through.
“Sir, one moment for the president,” the White House operator eventually said to Newsom as his signal kept going in and out. While he attempted to reach Biden, I spoke to Schuler in the gas station parking lot.
“In my twenty-six years, this could be one of the top, most devastating fires I’ve seen,” he said.
“What happens in a situation like this?” I wanted to know.
“The high school is destroyed. You’ve got churches destroyed. The two supermarkets in the community destroyed. How do you come back from something like this?”
“You come back one day at a time,” Schuler told me.
When Newsom’s signal continued to drop, he was driven around the corner to attempt to reach the president yet again.
“They’re gonna think I’m an asshole,” Newsom griped to an aide about leaving me and the crew behind.
With a satellite phone, Newsom tried again to reach Biden, and, feeling panicked because it was not working, he got out of the car and walked the streets searching for a cell signal. Confronted by a frantic local resident, Newsom explained what he was trying to do.
“I’m literally talking to the president right now to specifically answer the question of what we can do for you and your daughter.”
“Can I hear it?” the woman asked.
Newsom, pointing to his cell phone service bars, told her about the trouble he was having connecting.
“There’s literally—I’ve tried five times. That’s why I’m walking around to make the call.”
Newsom got back into his SUV. At 9:49 a.m. the White House pool reporter sent out a dispatch: “The president spoke with California Governor Gavin Newsom by phone to receive the latest update on the wildfires across Los Angeles.” They planned to meet less than an hour later, where Newsom would hand-deliver the disaster declaration request to Biden.
Meanwhile, as Los Angeles County Twelves continued to fight on the western flank of the Eaton Fire, hydrants started to go dry. The flames had not only overtaken McNally Avenue but also spread even farther toward Pasadena, where the Rose Bowl was now the active incident command post. By 10 a.m., Captain Joshua Swaney realized that the hydrants were dead, requiring runs to Pasadena to fill up their water tank and return to the blaze. At the Pasadena Convention Center, residents lined the walls and slumped on the floors. Wheelchairs and stretchers were visible down the hallway. KNBC was covering it live.
Going to Pasadena and the command post for relief wasn’t in the cards for Twelves, whose members’ heads were throbbing and eyes were bloodshot. They were subsisting on old military MREs—meals ready to eat—stashed in the truck, along with energy bars and whatever drinking water they had. County policy requires that fire engines need to be self-sustaining for three days, a function of being so close to so many potential massive brush fires in the San Gabriels. But this was another order of magnitude—a full-scale urban conflagration.
While in the Palisades the sun and some blue sky continued randomly to break through, Altadena remained under a shroud of greyness at the intersection of El Molino Avenue and Sacramento Street. Lemons and oranges hung off the trees at the height of citrus season. A loud explosion boomed as they had continued from one end of Los Angeles County in the Palisades to the other in Altadena for nearly twenty-four hours. The din caused another veteran reporter, KNBC’s Conan Nolan, to question what was happening around him, realizing he had no idea.
Still behind the wheel, I rolled up to my childhood home on Frontera Drive in the Palisades around 10:20 a.m. Even before we turned the corner, I could visualize its ruins. I was right.
On the way there, I had run into two guys on bikes who had snuck back into the Palisades around the checkpoints set up by the Los Angeles Police Department. If it wasn’t for the blue KN95 masks hanging off their ears, they could be on a regular morning ride through the neighborhood. I pulled over to them and rolled down the window. They were going through the same stage of grief as I was.
“I know my house is gone,” one of them said, “but I just need to see it firsthand to let it set in. I just can’t believe it.”
“I thought I was going to wake up this morning, and it was going to be a bad dream,” said the other. I told them to be safe and pulled away.
When I got to our old house, I opened the door of the Wagoneer and swung my legs out. A fire engine sat outside—but there was nothing to save.
“I don’t really know what to say” were the words that came out as our crew filmed me in real time. My hands were thrust in the pockets of my green fire pants, my NBC News baseball hat was on, and my face was caked in the soot we had been standing in all morning. The house was made of red brick, later painted white by the owner who bought it from my parents when I was around five or six. But when the house collapsed, the red brick was exposed again, as if the house were opening up to reveal something I hadn’t seen since we moved away. Welcoming me back home. I remember standing on the same street corner manning a lemonade stand with my brother. And hanging in our backyard pool with my sisters. And looking out my bedroom window at the street. There was nothing left.
I pulled out my phone and called my mom on FaceTime.
“Mom? Look at this.”
“Is that Frontera? Your birth house?” she asked as I panned the camera across the landscape, which looked as if it could have taken a direct hit from a ballistic missile—not all that different from what I had seen on the outskirts of Lviv, Ukraine, covering the early weeks of the war there.
“Yup.”
My mom let out a noise that was somewhere between a whimper and a sob.
“I’m so sad,” she said. “Every one of you was born in that house.”
The wind was picking up, and it was hard to hear her, but the devastated look on her face communicated volumes.
“I know. It makes me—it makes me sad, too,” I told her, choking back tears of my own. We talked for a while, and then I hung up. Tears traced a line through the blackness on my cheeks.
Eventually, standing on the sidewalk in front of the same white picket fence—now a dirty shade of grey entangled with the rose bushes that had butted up against them for decades—I got it together enough to look directly into the camera and reflect, for the first time, on what was really just beginning, for a report that would air on NBC Nightly News later that evening.
“This was a really, really special place for the Soboroff family. And I’m very sorry to see it go. And I’m very sorry for all of the residents of Pacific Palisades and everyone across the greater LA area that’s going through this right now. I look around the town, the neighborhood, the place that I grew up in. I talk to my friends who I spent so much time with on these streets, and it’s hard to imagine what comes next and what happens next.”
And then we went back to work.
Excerpted from the book 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.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Cover Star Teyana Taylor on Her Breakout Year
Autopsy Report: Inside the Murdoch Dynasty’s Final Moments
The 11 Best-Dressed Stars at the 2026 Golden Globes
See All the Fashion From the 2026 Golden Globes Red Carpet
See the Full List of Winners From the 2026 Golden Globes
The MAGA Dive Bar That’s Also a Church
The Life—and Shocking Murder—of Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten
Belle Burden On Her Family’s “Legacy of Infidelity”
Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff On Trump’s Second Term
From the Archive: Hitler’s Doomed Angel
