Moss Landing fire impact: Officials offer reassurance as some locals worry and wonder

Monterey County and the Monterey Bay Air Resources District have both offered reassurances about air quality, while some questions linger in the air following the fire at a battery storage facility in Moss Landing last week. 

“I’m happy to report that conditions are stable,” said North Monterey County Fire Chief Joel Mendoza at a virtual news briefing on Wednesday afternoon. 

The most recent time there were any visible flames or smoke was over the weekend, said Mendoza, and the department is prepared if the fire were to reignite. “The fire department, the County of Monterey and all the resources, including state and local, that assisted with the incident have not gone away,” he said. 

The blaze started last Thursday afternoon at the 300-megawatt battery storage facility. Evacuation orders soon followed for areas south of Elkhorn Slough, and the California Highway Patrol closed a stretch of Highway 1 around the Vistra Moss Landing Power Plant. Firefighters allowed the blaze to burn itself out as Monterey County officials lifted evacuation orders last Friday night. 

In neighboring Santa Cruz County, officials had warned residents to stay indoors as a precautionary measure when the fire first started. Local jurisdictions, such as Watsonville, posted the same warning on social media. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors also raised safety concerns following the incident, and plans to provide a comprehensive update at next week’s board meeting. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, a majority of the batteries at the facility were either burned or compromised, Mendoza said.

The Monterey Bay Air Resources District (MBARD), the regional agency for monitoring air quality in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties, did just that throughout the weekend. 

There are no major impacts to the area’s air quality that are a danger to health, David Frisbey, planning and air monitoring manager for MBARD, told Lookout on Wednesday morning. 

Frisbey clarified that while MBARD does not have the technology to test the air for hydrogen fluoride — the toxic pollutant associated with battery-fire emissions from lithium battery fires – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does. The agencies are working together to make sure data collected over the weekend is more digestible for the public, he said. 

“Results for hydrogen fluoride and particulate matter showed no risk to public health throughout the incident, and smoke from the facility has greatly diminished,” the EPA said in a Wednesday news release. 

Monterey County brought the federal agency in to assist with air monitoring shortly after the fire broke out at the battery storage facility, said Paul Amato, an EPA “on-site public information officer.”

At the Wednesday briefing, Amato further explained the EPA’s work. The EPA set up nine air monitoring stations to monitor hydrogen fluoride – two located at the power plant, four placed around the town perimeter and three out in the community. The effort: to capture changes in wind pattern, with a focus on potential impacts to workers and first responders in the area. 

“We saw very little cause for concern,” said Amato; as of Monday, the agency had concluded its air monitoring. Lookout has reached out to the EPA for further comment, but the agency could not provide a representative for an interview this week, due to response efforts focused on the Los Angeles wildfires. 

Vistra Corp., the Texas-based company that owns the Moss Landing facility, is conducting its own investigation, Brad Watson, senior director of community affairs, said at the briefing. The company plans to test the soil in the areas surrounding the facility, he said, and aims to provide updates on the company’s incident website. He added that it will take some time to determine how the fire began.

Questioning guidance from authorities

As Monterey County officials and Vistra continue to monitor the situation, some people who call the area home, conduct business or research there still have questions and concerns about the fire’s impacts. 

Dave and Jess Grigsby say the impacts have been “pretty significant” on Kayak Connection, their “mom-and-pop business” in the Moss Landing Harbor District. They also say they haven’t heard from any officials or local leaders about any potential side effects or dangers. 

“No one has reached out to us,” Jess Grigsby told Lookout. “There’s no entities saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’” 

Dave Grigsby said he called the Monterey County Department of Emergency Management and while staff there were sympathetic, “they really had no guidance.”

“There’s zero guidance from the authorities, so we’re kind of left to figure this out on our own,” he said. 

On Sunday and Monday, the Grigsbys went to check on their kayak operations and to collect employee timesheets so they could pay their employees. 

“We were wearing N-95 masks, and we noticed a metallic taste in our mouths pretty quickly,” he said, while Jess Grigsby said she noticed particulate matter on a dumpster when she tried to take out the trash. 

“There’s particulates on the equipment, who cleans that? Where’s the certification of safety?” she said. 

Adding to their questions on environmental safety and impacts are the financial losses. They closed down after the fire broke out last week and plan to reopen Thursday. 

Due to the closure, they canceled 10 kayak tours and about 40 rentals, and potentially dozens of walk-in rentals, leading, they say, to about $20,000 to $25,000 in losses. 

The Grigsbys also raised concerns about the impact on the local wildlife and vegetation.

“You put a lithium-ion storage facility within a stone’s throw of an ecologically sensitive area – close to Elkhorn Slough – that is in the fight for climate change,” said Jess. “We have a keystone species, Southern sea otters, here. What happens to them?” 

Lilian Carswell, a Ph.D. candidate and Southern sea otter researcher at UC Santa Cruz, said she and her colleagues are monitoring the sea otter population in the Moss Landing area for any potential fire aftermath. At this point, she told Lookout, they haven’t noticed any impact based on their observations.  

“We kept our eyes open for any acute effects that we could observe,” she said. “We didn’t know what we were looking for, but it was anything out of the ordinary. And we did not notice anything out of the ordinary.” 

Carswell said there are about 100 to 125 Southern sea otters who frequent or live in Elkhorn Slough, located in Moss Landing. A slough is a kind of wetland with marshy ground and makes up a part of the larger estuary. An estuary is a body of water where fresh and salt water mix. 

She said Southern sea otters are found only in California and there are more than 3,000 in the state. They’re a keystone species, Carswell said, because of the significant role they play in their ecosystem. They eat sea urchins, which if left unchecked could consume or completely deplete kelp beds offshore. Kelp beds are important food and shelter sources for a large number of organisms, from salmon to abalone. 

“They have very important effects, helping to stabilize the persistence of kelp beds offshore and helping to enhance seagrass beds within the estuary,” she said of the otters. 

“We have a really excellent baseline of what we expect to happen in the slough,” she said. “We know what sorts of things sea otters are expected to die from. We know the expected areas where sea otters should be. We know who we expect to see in the slough. So if we notice changes, that’s when we’ll investigate what is the reason for those changes.” 

Carswell said when she found out about the Moss Landing fire, her first thought was the safety of the sea otters. 

“We don’t know what sea otters were exposed to,” she said. “They were probably exposed to smoke, and particulates that fell out of air into water. … We don’t know if there will be any effects.” 

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