1 Year After The Moss Landing Battery Fire, EPA Says No Problem, Despite WidespreadToxic Metal Deposition
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The cleanup of the facility began in September. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 15,200 battery modules have been de-energized for recycling. So far, there have been no flareups during battery removal work. Stabilization and demolition of the facility began in December. The EPA estimates that further demolition, which will remove the severely burned section of the building, will begin in mid-2026. The building will be demolished to its foundation.
Residents of Moss Landing remember watching a plume of ash and smoke grow as the fire burned into the weekend. The fire lasted for roughly three days and reignited briefly again in mid-February. Flames shot up the side of the facility’s decommissioned smoke stacks. Battery debris and ash settled on the surrounding wetlands. Businesses and locals have sued for damages. Eventually, more than a thousand residents were temporarily evacuated. Shortly after the fire, the EPA said that there was no risk to public health, though many would report rashes, sore throats and headaches following the blaze. Some with pre-existing conditions noticed that their symptoms worsened and new ones appeared.
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Recent peer-reviewed research shows that after the fire, a thin layer of dust containing heavy metal particulates settled in Elkhorn Slough, the protected estuary adjacent to the battery storage facility. Ivano Aiello, a professor in marine geology at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Labs, was evacuated from his lab when the fire started. As soon as the evacuation notice lifted, he headed to Elkhorn Slough to test the soils for particulates. He remembers burned ash and battery remnants littering the field site. To date, his research is the only study that has examined the impacts of a large-scale battery fire.
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Many battery storage facilities are located outdoors, where groups of batteries are siloed away from each other. This arrangement generally helps to create a stopgap against catastrophic events. Moss Landing 300—the Vistra building that caught fire—contained an array of tightly packed batteries located in a decommissioned and converted gas-fired power plant. Experts say that storing batteries in large indoor installations, like Moss Landing 300, can make fire safety difficult. Vistra Moss Landing also used nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries, which are less stable than their newer—and industry favored—counterpart, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. The facility’s outdated indoor arrangement and dated battery chemistries, industry experts have said, made the Moss Landing configuration uniquely dangerous compared to newer installations. Regardless, the Vistra Moss Landing fire has left many around the county fearful of new battery installations.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16012026/a-year-out-from-one-of-the-worlds-largest-battery-facility-fires/