Jonathan Vigliotti, a CBS News national correspondent who covered last year’s devastating Southern California wildfires, examines a municipal failure and a hasty recovery in his new book Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn, and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild L.A. (One Signal/Atria Books, May 12). The book opens with a portrait of Pacific Palisades — a clifftop community whose mahogany sandstone cliffs once suggested both natural grandeur and a false sense of security.
Perched where the Santa Monica Mountains meet the Pacific, the Palisades was marketed in the early 1900s as refuge from the expanding city of Los Angeles: sunlit mesas, ocean views, and a Mediterranean climate. Over generations it transformed from a frontier for early filmmakers to a religious retreat, then a haven for refugees and artists, and finally a neighborhood of sprawling estates for the entertainment elite. That history, Vigliotti writes, fostered a confidence that people could tame the landscape — an illusion shattered on January 7, 2025.
A smoldering ember, likely ignited by fireworks in a patch of chaparral days earlier, flared into visible smoke before 10:30 a.m. Rescue teams were dispatched, but response was too slow to stop a fire that moved downslope into residential streets. With no defensible containment line, flames jumped into cul-de-sacs and neighborhoods the Los Angeles Fire Department had long identified as hard to protect. Traffic on Sunset Boulevard and other arteries ground to a halt as panicked residents fled; abandoned cars created chokepoints that kept engines out. Emergency radios begged civilians to shelter in place at higher elevations, but confusion and gridlock left large sections of the community effectively isolated.
Homeowners who stayed behind battled towering flames with garden hoses while the fire fed on dry chaparral and groves of eucalyptus — fuel so flammable it behaved like accelerant. Winds that night gusted to hurricane strength, and what began as a brush fire fused into a single voracious front. At its fiercest the blaze consumed ground at an astonishing rate, roaring through neighborhoods for three days before enough additional resources could push it back into the hills. When the smoke finally cleared, the toll was staggering: about four out of every five structures in parts of the Palisades were gone, and large swaths of the business district lay flattened, reduced to ash and twisted metal.
Vigliotti argues this was not merely the result of bad luck. Years of decisions — permitting development in fire-prone areas, lagging building codes that predate today’s era of megafires, underfunded and aging firefighting fleets, and tactics designed for a less extreme climate — combined to make the town vulnerable. Officials blamed drought and wind in the immediate aftermath, while omitting how understaffed departments, delayed reinforcements, and blocked roads amplified the catastrophe. Private crews and residents themselves filled gaps the public system left open, but acknowledging that would have exposed systemic failures.
On the ground during the crisis, Vigliotti and his team saw what footage alone did not capture: hesitations by officials, resources that never arrived, and bureaucratic barriers that hindered response. He also watched recovery efforts take shape in ways he calls dangerously rushed. As Los Angeles prepared to host events tied to the Olympic spotlight, political leaders and developers moved quickly to rebuild — often prioritizing legacy, speed, and optics over resilience and long-term safety. What appeared as bipartisan cooperation, he contends, was too frequently a coalition pushing forward quick fixes rather than structural change.
The book is both an eyewitness account and an urgent warning. Vigliotti frames Pacific Palisades as a parable for communities worldwide facing a warming planet: when leaders allow outdated norms to persist and prioritize short-term gains, the consequences are amplified by climate-driven extremes. Rebuilding without embracing new ideas — tougher building standards, smarter land use, better-resourced fire services, and transparent accountability — risks repeating the same cycle.
Vigliotti stresses that meaningful reform will be difficult and require political courage. He draws a cautionary lesson about public memory and political incentives: when voters forget, politicians rarely pay the full price for risky decisions. His on-the-ground reporting, including pulling animals from burning homes and documenting the first critical days of the fire, gives the book a firsthand urgency.
Torched is positioned as more than a local chronicle; it’s an appeal to policymakers and communities to act before the next catastrophe. The Pacific Palisades fire, the author warns, is not an isolated tragedy — it’s a global warning about the high cost of ignoring how climate change reshapes risk, and about the perils of rebuilding quickly without addressing the vulnerabilities that allowed disaster to occur in the first place.