NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff stood outside the skeleton of his childhood home, tapping his mother’s name into his cellphone. “Mom? Look at this,” he said, panning the phone to take in a residential block in Pacific Palisades that was burned down to its chimneys and foundations. “I’m so sad,” Soboroff’s mother said. “It makes me sad too,” Soboroff told her. “This was a really, really special place for the Soboroff family, and I’m very sorry to see it go.”
The two-minute clip, which aired on NBC Nightly News Wednesday, is just one of the extraordinary and devastating scenes flooding TV airwaves and social media this week, as wind-driven firestorms devoured some 25,000 acres of Southern California and forced more than 100,000 people to flee.
NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff surveys the damage dealt to his childhood home.
Such fires have grown increasingly common across the American West as climate change has intensified drought conditions. But in clip after clip of raging flames and raining ash, local residents and journalists alike have echoed a similar, shell-shocked refrain: This one feels different. “Everyone you know is affected somehow,” CNN senior producer Jason Kravarik told Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources.
Soboroff’s coverage has been particularly striking, in part because it’s so personal. The NBC political and national correspondent grew up in Pacific Palisades, one of the communities most devastated by the ongoing fires. In emotional dispatches from burned-out grocery stores and residential neighborhoods, he’s reflected on what the community means to him: “I can close my eyes and walk around and tell you what this place used to look like,” he said Thursday on Morning Joe. “It is no more … It was a tinderbox ready to go.”
But he’s not the only reporter covering an apocalypse close to home. On Wednesday morning, his NBC News colleague Liz Kreutz, who is based in Los Angeles, posted a harrowing 12-second video of her drive down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, where clouds of orange smoke and ash almost obscured the smoldering foundations of dozens of ruined houses.
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