Quick Take
People who live near Moss Landing still have more questions than answers about the massive fire that started Jan. 16, 2025, at the world’s second-largest battery storage facility.
When Prunedale resident Ed Mitchell first heard about an industrial fire in Moss Landing a year ago, the 78-year-old was celebrating his birthday with longtime friends at a neighbor’s house.
“We were having cake, and the TV and our phones came on with alerts that there was this Moss Landing fire,” Mitchell said. He and his friends “literally walked 20 feet” from his neighbor’s living room to the outdoor patio and looked west toward the blaze.
From his friend’s hillside property, Mitchell could see the flames rising halfway up the 500-foot twin smokestacks and a growing plume of smoke.
“It was like, ‘Man, this is going to be bad,’ and we’re going to have to do something about it,” said Mitchell, 78, who has lived in the small community in northern Monterey County for decades.
The fire had started earlier on Jan. 16, 2025, at a battery energy storage facility inside a decommissioned gas power plant. The smoke that Mitchell and his friends watched from afar that evening contained heavy metals from the burning lithium-ion batteries. The facility, owned by Texas-based Vistra Corp., was the second-largest battery storage plant in the world and stored excess solar power generated during the day to use when energy demand peaks.
Firefighters let the massive blaze burn itself out over three days, because putting it out with water would’ve risked reigniting the batteries.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders and the California Highway Patrol closed Highway 1. In neighboring Santa Cruz County, officials warned nearby residents to stay indoors until the next afternoon.
The fire reignited nearly a month later, on Feb. 18, apparently from batteries buried beneath the rubble.
A year later, residents like Mitchell are still asking questions and feeling unsatisfied with the answers they’re getting from government experts and Vistra alike.
Residents accuse officials of ‘lacking transparency’ following the fire
Within days of the fire, residents in northern Monterey County were begging government officials, from the county to the state and federal levels, to explain what caused the fire.
Tonya Rivera told Lookout she posted a callout on Facebook that weekend – the fire had started on a Thursday – asking fellow Prunedale residents to gather and ask for answers. That Monday, 250 people showed up at a community meeting at the Prunedale Grange, with an additional 400 on Zoom.
Mitchell helped lead that meeting and said he still hasn’t gotten a satisfactory explanation about what caused the fire from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is currently investigating how the fire started and who is at fault, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is overseeing the site cleanup.
“They haven’t defined for the public what was the ignition event. What caused the fire?” he said. “They haven’t reported anything about why it wasn’t suppressible” with traditional firefighting strategies.
No timeline for the investigation into the fire’s cause
A representative for the CPUC told Lookout via email that the commission’s review of the Moss Landing fire is still ongoing. The spokesperson did not provide a timeline for when the investigation would be complete, but said the review will include a “root cause analysis” by an independent consultant.
Vistra, which is also conducting its own independent investigation, has not released information on what started the fire, but experts have pointed to the plant’s outdated design with batteries enclosed in a building.
Alex Johnson, executive director of trade association American Clean Power-California, told Lookout via email, “The battery storage industry follows the rigorous standards that require battery storage sites to be built differently today.”
The batteries at Moss Landing were housed in the turbine hall of a gas power plant built in the 1950s and repurposed for battery storage in 2020. Johnson said nearly all of today’s batteries are stored in separated modular units resembling shipping containers to minimize risk and provide cleaner power that helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Battery storage makes California’s grid more reliable and its electricity more affordable by storing the state’s abundant solar power and pushing it onto the grid when demand is highest,” Johnson said. “Fires are extremely rare, even as California has grown its [battery] storage fleet by 2,100% since 2019.”
The state wants to be carbon-free by 2045, but Mitchell said that it’s frustrating to sit and watch state officials push for renewable energy without taking enough corrective action following the Moss Landing fire. He added that while he sees the need for battery storage plants, the industry should learn from the incident in order to move forward.
Meanwhile, the cleanup of the site proceeds, with the EPA tasked by the state with overseeing battery removal. Kazami Brockman, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator, said more than 15,000 battery modules have been deenergized and transferred for recycling.
Brockman told Lookout that the EPA’s primary mission in Moss Landing is to remove the batteries safely and mitigate fire risk from the equipment still on site. “The county and the state are leading the evaluation of any potential ongoing exposure,” he said.
He added that the agency conducts air monitoring on site, along the perimeter and within the nearby community. The sampling is meant to detect any pollution, such as heavy metal particles from the batteries, leaving the site, Brockman said.
Testing levels have been normal, with a couple samples finding metals at the perimeter, but not enough to threaten the community, he said: “I think it’s important to keep in mind that this is an industrial area, and these metals naturally occur in the environment.”
Residents do their own science
That’s not reassuring to Mitchell and Rivera, who take issue with the EPA’s efforts, calling them lacking in transparency. As part of a grassroots organization called Never Again Moss Landing, which grew out of that meeting, they started surveying people in Prunedale about symptoms like headache, sore throat and a metallic taste in their mouths.
The group has also conducted its own sampling with wipe tests that collect toxic material that might’ve fallen on their properties with swabs or special paper. Mitchell said he believes particles from the toxic plume spread beyond the battery storage facility.
When the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control conducted testing last January, the limited-scale study did not show heavy metal particles at levels high enough to pose a health risk. Other air monitoring studies, conducted by the EPA and Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, did not find levels that threaten human health either.
In September, Monterey County released data that found concentrations of heavy metals in surface water and sediment near the facility were below the “human health risk.”
However, in the first peer-reviewed research on the fire to be published in a scientific journal, a team of researchers at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories estimated that nearly 55,000 pounds of heavy metals had contaminated soil within a mile surrounding Elkhorn Slough following the massive blaze.
The soil samples from the marsh account for only 2% of the chemicals released from the fire, according to lead researcher Ivano Aiello, a marine biology professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Scientists were able to link the samples to the fire because the nickel-to-cobalt ratio matched the chemical discharge from batteries at the Moss Landing plant.
Mitchell said Aiello’s research validates his concerns about high concentrations of heavy metals from the burned batteries traveling farther. But he said it also begs the question: “Where did the other 98% of that pollution go?”
About 1,000 residents have joined a mass-action lawsuit led by Southern California-based law firm Singleton Schreiber alleging Vistra failed to implement adequate fire safety measures, including proper maintenance, thermal runaway prevention and compliance with fire safety standards.
“It’s emotionally difficult for a lot of folks,” said lead attorney Knut Johnson. “They’re all concerned about their health in the future.”
He said it might take a while to figure out what the fire’s health effects are. His team is conducting its own soil and water testing on his clients’ properties, and many of his clients are documenting their symptoms.
How the fire changed battery storage facility regulation
In the year following the fire, elected officials at the state and local level weighed stringent rules for battery storage facilities against the need for reliable renewable energy sources. At the same time, residents in Santa Cruz County are also fighting a proposal from Massachusetts-based New Leaf Energy to build a brand-new battery facility with the latest technology outside of Watsonville.
New county regulations for battery storage facilities are inching closer to becoming law after the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed earlier this week to move forward with environmental review after almost a year of delays — partly due to the Moss Landing fire and partly to wait for a bill authored by state Sen. John Laird to pass the state Legislature and become law. Those regulations require developers to coordinate with local fire departments and were supported by the battery storage industry.
The county’s proposed law would require battery storage facilities to conduct ongoing soil and water testing, and also to comply with Laird’s law as well as standards set by the National Fire Protection Association for setbacks from property lines.
Officials in Monterey County are also working on an ordinance, and last fall struck down the idea of a temporary moratorium on facilities until those rules were created.
The members of Never Again Moss Landing said they’ll continue to push officials for information and remind their community about what they’re fighting for, said Mitchell.
“We’ve identified weaknesses. We’ve called them out,” he said. “We’ve asked for the right types of pollution information, and we’ll see what’s coming down towards us.”
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