For Reporters, Coverage of LA Fires Became Personal

NBC News Jacob Soboroff

Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News with deep roots in the community, showed viewers the remains of his family’s former home on Frontera Drive in Pacific Palisades.

Last week, Soboroff visited the site of a nearby playground where he romped as a child. His father, longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, had led the effort to renovate the recreation facility after it fell into disrepair. It was gone. The home of his pregnant sister’s in-laws, where she was staying during her own home’s renovation, was also leveled.

Soboroff no longer lives in Pacific Palisades. But he knows its now-unrecognizable streets as well as if he had a Google map in his head, he told The LA Times.

Often the biggest challenge for the L.A.-based journalists, who worked around the clock since the blazes broke out, was coping with their own emotions, fears and feelings of loss as they reported on their home city’s transformation into scenes that resembled war zones.

Fox News Jonathan Hunt

Fox News correspondent Jonathan Hunt reported on the flames that encroached Palisades Charter High School, where his 17-year-old daughter is a student. While informing viewers about the threat, he privately worried she would be back to remote learning after losing a year in the classroom during the pandemic.

Hunt was relieved that the school “was largely OK,” but local landmarks where he spent time with his children were wiped out.

Longtime CNN correspondent Nick Watt told viewers on Wednesday how after he finished his reporting he was headed to his home in Santa Monica to hose it down, hoping it would deter embers from starting a blaze.

“It’s extraordinary to cover something like this in your own community,” he said. “I’ve been covering fires for a long time. You have sympathy for people. Now I have empathy.”

Correspondents said they were deluged by West Coast-based colleagues, friends and strangers asking them to check if their homes were still standing.

For Kris Van Cleave, CBS News’ senior transportation correspondent and a Los Angeles-area native, covering the Eaton fire near Altadena and Pasadena cut too close to home. He witnessed a 91-year-old man’s home burn to the ground.

“Covering this fire is coming home — not in the way I want to,” Van Cleave told TheWrap. “These stories are always hard because everyone I meet today will be having one of the worst days of their lives, and that’s the challenge as a reporter.”

Ginger Zee, ABC News’ chief meteorologist and chief climate correspondent, witnessed Altadena first responders lose their own homes as they toiled to save others’ in the east side neighborhood. LAFD Capt. Dan Lievense pointed out to her some “homes across the street of one of his buddies who’s a firefighter, and that house is gone,” she said.

And Liz Kreutz, NBC News National Correspondent, recalled encountering a Palisades man who rented a bicycle near Downtown L.A. and desperately rode back to try to save his two dogs. “He wasn’t allowed to get past the fire line, and he was crying and so worried, and a first responder saw him and talked to him, and that first responder went and got his address, drove to the house, checked on the house, checked on the dogs, and brought them back to him,” Kreutz said.