The world’s largest lithium battery plant erupted in a massive blaze on Jan. 16, smoldering and smoking near Monterey, Calif., for days. A sharp chemical smell swept through from Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing Power Plant to the surrounding foothills, up the coast toward Santa Cruz, and down into the Salinas Valley’s farming mecca.
Nearly two weeks later, residents in the surrounding areas—some as far as 30 miles away—are complaining of stinging and itchy eyes, burning skin, sore throats, irritated gums, rashes, and even breathing problems—symptoms associated with exposure to smoke from a lithium-ion fire. Vistra and local and federal authorities, however, have denied that nearby residents face health risks. It’s also the fourth battery fire since 2014 at Moss Landing—a key facility for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D.) plans to divert California away from fossil fuels.
“First you could smell the chemicals, and then there was a metallic taste in my mouth, so I gathered my small animals and went down to my brother’s,” some 150 miles away, said Tonya Rivera, who lives about two miles from Moss Landing. “That was the beginning of the symptoms. Since that time, I’ve had a runny nose, a sore throat, and my eyes are continuously watering. They itch. This past Saturday, my face broke out with a rash.”
Issara Willenskomer also quickly fled. His wife, a Ukrainian who remembers the Chernobyl disaster from when she was a child, insisted on leaving at once.
“I stepped outside, and it was clearly not forest fire smoke—it was definitely not that,” said Willenskomer, a web product designer who lives about 20 miles north of the plant. They drove even farther north for four and a half hours to Mendocino County and stayed there until the smoke cleared.
Rivera and the Willenskomers are part of a nearly 3,000-member Facebook page dedicated to chronicling symptoms, sharing studies, and coordinating local action surrounding the Vistra fire. They have good reason to worry. Lithium-ion battery fires can release “large amounts of hydrogen fluoride,” which “can pose a serious toxic threat,” researchers found in 2017. Even at low levels, breathing in that gas “can irritate the eyes and respiratory tract (mouth, throat, lungs, nose),” according to the CDC. At high levels, hydrogen fluoride can “cause death from an irregular heartbeat or from fluid buildup in the lungs.”
The January blaze—which ignited as attention was focused on the Los Angeles wildfires—was the fourth at Moss Landing in as many years. Three were at Vistra’s battery plant, and a fourth occurred at a Pacific Gas and Electric Company facility. Lithium batteries are prone to especially hot fires that can burn for days and can’t be readily extinguished with water.
Moss Landing is nestled up against the Elkhorn Slough, a wildlife and wetlands preserve, but the Newsom administration approved it in 2019 anyway, declaring that its operations posed no “significant harm” to the local environment.
Officials have repeatedly asserted that there’ve been zero health risks in the air from the January fire. At 6 p.m. on Jan. 17, a day after the blaze started, Monterey County lifted its fire-related evacuation orders. On Jan. 22, local air regulators said “smoke from the battery fire did not impact ground-level areas where people live” and that the air quality met “health-based state and federal standards.” But they also admitted that they don’t have the ability to test for hydrogen fluoride in the air.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did, however, collect that data. “Results for hydrogen fluoride and particulate matter showed no risk to public health throughout the incident,” the EPA reported on Jan. 20. The agency then passed its testing operations to a private consulting firm retained by Vistra.
An EPA spokeswoman in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon reiterated that finding. She said the agency’s sensors detect other mineral acid gases beyond hydrogen fluoride but conservatively assumed that “anything we were detecting was hydrogen fluoride, which is the most harmful of those mineral acid gases.”
Vistra’s website said the company is “working cooperatively to ensure public health and safety, which is our top priority,” and stressed that “ongoing air monitoring has not detected anything hazardous.”
Monterey County’s air pollution control officer, Richard Stedman, told the Free Beacon that the only downgrades to local air quality were from people using wood stoves. “People reporting symptoms should consult their health care provider if possible,” he wrote in an email.
“We remain fairly confident that there was no adverse impact associated with emissions from the plant fire,” Stedman said at a Monterey County board of supervisors meeting on Jan. 21. “We did not do speciation of chemicals found because that would be a pretty exhaustive and expensive process to do.”
Yet locals have questioned that official line since the fire broke out, especially those who started experiencing symptoms when the fire broke out. They worry about possible chronic health effects.
The Facebook group “Moss Landing Power Plant/Vistra Fire Symptoms” spurred a grassroots, self-funded effort to test surfaces throughout the area surrounding the facility, going as far as 30 miles away. Organizer Brian Roeder on Tuesday sent some 125 surface-wipe samples to a Salt Lake City lab to analyze for heavy metals, including cobalt, lithium, magnesium, and nickel. Roeder said he expects results in a few weeks and will post them online.
“We don’t have an agenda,” Roeder said. “We’re just starting to get data.”
The most significant evidence of toxic fallout that residents have seen came Monday from a team of researchers at nearby San Jose State University, who, for the last decade, have sampled soils from Elkhorn Slough. The preserve, which was reopened to the public Jan. 21, showed “a dramatic increase” of nickel, manganese, and cobalt, heavy metals that are used in lithium-ion batteries, the researchers reported.
“These nanoparticles are used in cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries … clearly connecting the occurrence of the heavy metals to airborne cathode material from the Vistra battery fire,” the university said in a press release about the study. “These heavy metals will chemically transform as they move through the environments and potentially through the food web, affecting local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.”
The report reassured those suffering from symptoms.
“The fact the scientists found this in the Elkhorn Slough confirms what everyone suspected: that there were definitely heavy metals and toxins in the air,” said Heather Griffin, a realtor from nearby Prunedale who has helped organize the grassroots surface testing.
Griffin said she’s had a metallic taste in her mouth as well as irritated teeth, gums, and mouth since the start of the fire. At Poison Control’s recommendation, Griffin took a blood test Tuesday for cyanide, lithium, heavy metals, and carbon monoxide. She has not yet received the results.
“People are having these symptoms and side effects. We know the air is not fine,” Griffin said. “So now no one trusts the EPA. They don’t know if they’re testing for all the chemicals.”
On Jan. 23, Vistra, which did not respond to a request for comment, announced a partnership with a local charity to offer gift cards for households inside Monterey’s evacuation area. The company said it followed an emergency plan required by a 2023 state law—a law it spent $70,000 lobbying on, according to its disclosures.
Monterey County spokesman Nicholas Pasculli, meanwhile, said the local environmental health bureau is sampling soil and water for the state and is hoping to publish results by the end of the week.
Public fear and worry over the incident was on full display during a Tuesday board of supervisors meeting in nearby Santa Cruz County, where another battery storage plant is being planned. During the public comment period, one local noted that if a fire were to break out at the proposed site—an agricultural area outside of Watsonville—it could cause a massive disaster. “It’s basically suicidal,” she said.
As for the burned Moss Landing plant, Griffin said, “many people are so upset, they just want them gone.”
Moss Landing’s battery facilities are also critical to Newsom’s plan to push California away from fossil fuels since wind and solar power require battery storage. Vistra completed a 350-megawatt expansion of its Moss Landing lithium battery storage in 2023.
California regulators predict the state will need 52 gigawatts of battery storage to meet Newsom’s 2045 electrification mandate—nearly four times the 13.3 it has today. Each factory can supply just a fraction of that total amount. Vistra’s Moss Landing plant supplied the most at 750 megawatts. Meanwhile, lithium batteries already pose an environmental headache, with one Australian study finding that more than 98 percent of them end up in landfills. In less than three years, one U.S. landfill alone faced 124 lithium battery fires, the EPA reported in 2021.
A Monterey County lawmaker, however, told the Los Angeles Times that the Vistra fire shows the need to move slowly with the state’s electrification push.
“What we’re doing with this technology is way ahead of government regulations and ahead of the industry’s ability to control it,” county supervisor Glenn Church said.
