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.
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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On CNN, Nick Watt—also based in LA—has broadcast live from active fire scenes and debris-filled streets, surrounded by burning houses and felled trees. On Tuesday night, he was almost hit by a piece of debris on-air while covering the destruction of a Palisades Village apartment building.
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Another CNN team narrowly made it out of an active fire zone on Tuesday as explosions went off around them.
Local TV reporters, meanwhile, have captured amazing scenes of both heroism and surreality. “This feels like a scene you would see in a movie,” reporter Matthew Seedorff of LA’s Fox 11 said as he walked past the carcasses of burned-out cars on West Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades on Wednesday; hours later, he posted video from an active fire scene, his voice raised over the roar of flames and hoses.
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KTLA’s Gene Kang spotted actor and writer Steve Guttenberg moving parked cars on Palisades Drive. At KCAL, reporter Jasmine Viel and photographer John Schreiber interrupted their reporting to help a distraught homeowner free her backyard chickens from a coop next to a burning house. “We’re just at the chicken coop,” a breathless Viel said on-air. “We have the camera on the ground because we’re grabbing the last of the chickens … and carrying them out.”
Several terrifying videos taken from inside burning homes are also making the social media rounds. On Wednesday evening, the BBC verified one viral clip from the YouTube storm-chaser Tanner Charles, which shows Charles and a friend abandoning the friend’s Rustic Canyon home as a fire alarm screeches in the background and embers fly around them.
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A second, minute-long video—first posted to X on Wednesday—appears to show two men trapped in a doomed house, its floor-to-ceiling windows blocked by billowing walls of flame. “You’re gonna be okay. Hi, you’re gonna be okay,” one man can be heard saying to a dog. That clip has been viewed millions of times on X alone, but has not yet been verified by a mainstream outlet.
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