The Mystery of the Moss Landing Battery Fire

People say they can still taste the metal from the Moss Landing fire. But no one in the local, state, or federal government is able to say why.

The story of Moss Landing got little attention compared to the scale of the disaster. On January 16 — days before Trump reentered office, and as fires continued to burn in and around Los Angeles, when tempers and attention spans were already strained — the Moss Landing Power Plant ignited. We still don’t know what caused the fire, but we do know a few crucial facts: Nearly all of the batteries at the 300 megawatt facility, one of the world’s largest, burned up in the fire, sending a colossal plume of black smoke soaring up from the site for days.

Two months after the blaze was extinguished, many people who live in the vicinity of Moss Landing, a couple hours south of San Francisco, say they’re still sick from the fire. Community organizers on the ground say the number of sick people is in the hundreds, at least. The symptoms range, but there are a few commonalities. Many report having bloody noses in the days immediately following the fire. In the long weeks that followed, they’ve had headaches that don’t respond to pain medications, rashes that resemble burns, and a recurring metallic taste in their mouths. They all say their symptoms go away if they leave their homes and go further away from the site. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California state regulators have given the all clear.

I have spent weeks trying to get to the bottom of what happened at Moss Landing. I’ve interviewed people who lived in the area and say they’ve experienced breathing issues and other difficulties, many of whom have gathered on Facebook to share photos, stories, and symptoms. Others have offered testimony about these illnesses in public fora and town halls. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Vistra, the company that runs Moss Landing, over the fire, citing these health issues. Vistra denies the existence of evidence proving pollution from the fire is making people sick, and told me in a statement that the company is “committed to doing everything we can to do right by our community.”

“Moss Landing is not only home to our facility, it’s home to our employees and neighbors,” the statement reads.

And yet, the people say, their symptoms persist. One of the people who told me about their condition is Sheryl Davidson, a former receptionist who lives in the rural nearby town of Prunedale. One of her joys used to be doing Medieval cultural re-enactments, but since the fire she’s been unable to participate.

“My nose just started bleeding. It was traumatic,” she told me. “And I had asthma, but my asthma was miniscule. My whole life, I just had an inhaler. But the inhaler wasn’t working.”

Davidson has other symptoms, including headaches. She says a lump also developed in her face beneath one of her eyes, of which she sent me photos. Despite concerns that something in the air from the fire may have made her sick, she hasn’t left her home, a house she’d lived in since she was a child.

Part of the reason: No one is telling her to leave.

Officials in Monterey County, where Moss Landing is located, acknowledged to me in a statement that they received reports from medical providers that local residents sought care for symptoms related to the battery fire. The EPA said on January 20 that air monitoring throughout the fire incident found no substantial releases of hydrogen fluoride, a fatal pollutant released from battery fires. Records indicate that EPA tested for the particulate matter as well, but there’s no evidence it monitored specifically for heavy metals in the air. Vistra told me it has been doing environmental observations since the incident and is sharing the results with regulators, but said in a statement that it “has not detected risks to public health at this time.”

Davidson may have stayed, but others have left Prunedale, including Brian Roeder, who remembers seeing the fire break out while at home and deciding to leave town with his wife and son out of an abundance of caution. When they got back days later, the fire had been put out. But Roeder told me his wife, who he said is immunocompromised, began reporting breathing issues shortly after they returned. His son started coughing, as well. They quickly left home again, and have been living out of short-term rental apartments far away from the battery plant for weeks.

“This community has been significantly damaged, and they are not coming in to help anybody,” Roeder told me. “There’s been behind the scenes efforts, there’s been some work, but nothing commensurate with the size of this disaster.”

“I know that L.A. caught on fire at the exact same time,” Roeder continued. “That was the huge focus for the state. I know that planes were going down and we had a change in administration. But the fact remains that we, here, cannot explain the absence of support for what is happening from the state. And there’s been a pronounced absence.”

Why Moss Landing matters

Roeder also started a community organization called Never Again Moss Landing, which has been collecting its own samples of the environment in consultation with a professional lab. In doing so, Roeder became part of a broader effort in the U.S. to create public safeguards for battery storage technology in the wake of Moss Landing. Ground zero for this push is, fittingly, California, where the state Public Utility Commission has responded to the fire by requiring battery storage facility owners to make emergency response plans and adhere to modern fire codes for battery storage.

Some Democratic lawmakers in California want to go further, empowering localities to be the final decisionmakers on whether storage projects get built, as opposed to state regulators.

In some pockets of the U.S., this push for battery safety risks morphing into a threat to the energy transition. For my newsletter, The Fight, I’ve chronicled how towns and counties across the U.S., from New York City to rural Texas, are now banning battery storage, citing the Moss Landing fire and the fear another battery fire could happen in their backyards.

By many metrics, Moss Landing is an outlier. The Moss Landing facility was a giant field of batteries inside a former factory, essentially trapping all these combustible mini-bombs prone to “thermal runaway,” a phenomenon where rising heat from a fire leads to a chain reaction of chemical ignition, inside an insulated box. Concerns about thermal runaway are a reason why almost all battery storage today is installed in storage containers and with an appropriate distance between individual batteries.

But Moss Landing is also a crucial test case for the future of battery storage and public trust.

This morning, the renewables sector took a big stride towards attempting to calm the rage against battery storage. American Clean Power, the leading renewables trade group, released an analysis of 35 battery storage fires in the U.S. from 2012 through the end of last year. Many of the incidents involved “early-generation” battery tech, it said, adding that “improved safety measures, such as advanced thermal management, suppression systems, and containment enclosures, significantly reduc[ed] the likelihood of large-scale incidents.”

The analysis does not speculate as to what may have caused the fire at Moss Landing, simply noting investigations into the incident are ongoing. But at the same time, ACP released a new blueprint for safe battery storage development. In the blueprint, the association acknowledges that some of its recommendations — including a requirement that all battery storage facilities meet a new fire safety standard produced years after Moss Landing was commissioned — are aimed at “holistically addressing concerns generated by the Moss Landing Fire.”

Nothing to add

Residents are deeply suspicious of the official assessments denying what, to them, are obvious health impacts. To be candid, I can’t blame them. It strains credulity to imagine a battery fire of this size and scope right next door to you somehow creating no pollution worthy of public concern.

“When you burn [batteries] it moves toxic chemicals into the air,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA senior scientist and policy advisor specializing in chemical contamination of the environment, who now works at the University of California San Francisco. “If this is an uncontrolled burn, you can’t just say there isn’t going to be fallout from that or exposure to the population.”

There’s data making people afraid too. In late January, researchers at San Jose State University alerted the public that they’d discovered “unusually high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles” and a “hundreds- to thousand-fold” increase in nickel, manganese, and cobalt — metals all present in Moss Landing’s batteries — in soil two miles from the power plant in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve, one of the state’s biggest estuaries. Exposure to these metals can cause serious health issues, some of which mirror the symptoms described by residents in the area who are sick.

Exposure to dust with heavy metals can be dangerous at even relatively low levels. A county health advisory shared with local medical professionals in February urged doctors to complete a comprehensive physical of anyone concerned about the impacts of the fire on their health. It noted that breathing or coming into direct skin contact with “heavy metal dusts and other particulate matter from smoke” can result in a metallic taste and difficulty breathing, as well as exacerbate underlying conditions like asthma.

Discovering the metals’ omnipresence in the Slough after the fire led Ivano Aiello, a researcher at SJSU who collected that data, to conclude that the contamination is probably more widespread than is publicly understood.

“I freaked out [after the study] because I was breathing the stuff. I was out there for days and I had no idea,” he told me. “Then I alerted the authorities … and they did their own investigation.”

Subsequent studies conducted by county and state environmental officials, including within the Elkhorn Slough, found no level of these heavy metals that they said could be conclusively tied to the fire. On March 19, farm advisors at the University of California Cooperative Extension undertook a “limited study” that found a “slight deposition of metals (copper and manganese) may have occurred in one agricultural field closest to the battery fire site,” but that the “concentration of metals measured were within normal ranges for all soil types evaluated.” Dole, the giant produce company, which has operations in the area, told me that on its end “no health impacts have been reported and no soil contamination has been detected as a result of the Moss Landing battery fire.”

But Roeder and many other members of the surrounding communities are worried there isn’t enough testing being done to find out whether contaminants entered the atmosphere, especially since air pollution is rarely spread evenly. Like Covid-19, the only way we will ever know the extent of the problem is with more testing, testing, testing.

Roeder is trying to do this work himself. On what he says is his own dime, he and other members of Never Again Moss Landing have collected dust samples across the region in consultation with a credentialed lab in the state, BioMax, which he told me reached out after the fire.

On Wednesday, a local NBC affiliate reported that Don Smith, a toxicologist at the University of California San Diego, confirmed elevated levels of nickel, cobalt, and manganese in the dust samples collected by Never Again Moss Landing. “There is reason to be concerned,” Smith told the TV station, adding that people living near the plant should wear masks regularly if they’re interacting with dust in their homes and be careful not to disturb soil in their yards. “Both manganese and, to a lesser extent, cobalt are known to be neurotoxins. And nickel, of course, is recognized as a carcinogen.”

Frustratingly, though, there is no solid proof to date of a conclusive link between the illnesses and metal exposure — just a lot of people with symptoms, a study that hasn’t been replicated in other pieces of research, and samples collected by residents who are also involved in litigation against the company. Still, that’s a lot of evidence of a problem. Medical mysteries are also common in environmental catastrophes like the Flint water crisis and the infamous DuPont PFOA debacle in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in which obviously sick residents butted heads with regulators for years, demanding information and testing.

What’s next for Moss Landing? The three counties most impacted — Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito — just concluded a community health survey that solicited comments from potentially impacted residents and received more than 1,500 responses, according to figures I reviewed that were shared at a recent Monterey County public meeting. When that study is out, we’ll have a comprehensive view of the locations where the sick live to see where it lines up with the plume that emitted from Moss Landing.

Taking a wider view, any society that’s going to rely primarily on intermittent energy sources like solar and wind needs battery storage to keep the lights on. That will require winning the public’s trust in battery technology. The Moss Landing fire was bad, and over time risks becoming an East Palestine moment for the energy transition. But the lack of a loud, sizable government response to calm the nerves of people publicly claiming illness is likely to be even more damaging to the future of the battery sector.