Small clouds dot the blue sky outside Sherry Okamoto’s house in Royal Oaks — a small, rural community about 6 miles from the Moss Landing battery plant.
It’s starkly different from the afternoon of January 16, when a plume of stinky black smoke moved in.
“As soon as I opened the door, I got hit with burnt plastic,” Okamoto said.
She and her husband were scared and didn’t know what was going on. They started wrangling their animals — chickens, ducks, cats, and dogs — to get them inside.
“My eyes were burning. My nose was burning,” Okamoto said. “We were already coughing, and we weren't out long.”
The smoke was coming from a building that housed 99,000 lithium-ion battery modules. They store renewable energy but had caught on fire.
Monterey County quickly issued an evacuation order for about 1,200 people who lived up to about 3 miles away.
Lithium battery fires are notoriously hard to fight, and firefighters said they had to let it burn out because water would have been ineffective.
The evacuation order was lifted the following evening. The fire did not destroy any homes nor kill any people. But there was evidence of the fire miles beyond the evacuation zone. Okamoto still has a bucket filled with thick, black water that she hauled out of her duck pool.
“There's oil and soot and powder, and that's what I stuck my hands into because I didn't want my ducks to get sick,” she said, adding that the water burned her hands and gave her a rash.
The Monterey County Health Department said 49 people had reported fire-related symptoms as of February 19. County officials said preliminary tests of soil, water, and air around the plant do not pose an immediate public health hazard, but two soil tests did show elevated contaminant levels that require follow-up. If people are worried, county officials say they should see their doctor.
Meanwhile, thousands have joined Facebook groups where people are discussing the symptoms they think may be due to the fire.
Jen Wrenne is one of them. She lives about 12 miles from the battery plant in the Aptos hills.
“I've had a lot of difficulty breathing,” Wrenne said. “My heart rate will jump up like crazy.”
She’s gone to the doctor’s office four times in the last month. The first doctor told her she had allergies. She asked for blood tests to check for the metals found in lithium batteries and then had to go back for a redraw because of a lab mix-up.
When she still wasn’t feeling well five days after that, a physician’s assistant told her to see her primary care doctor.
“[Who] I can't get in to see for three months,” she said.
At one point, she thought maybe she had a sinus infection. So she got antibiotics from a fourth doctor. But she still didn’t feel better.
Finally, she got the blood test results back from her redraw. They didn’t show anything concerning except, “they ended up testing (for) magnesium instead of manganese.”
Magnesium is not in the batteries, the heavy metal manganese is.
So she’s getting yet another test.
“It's been really hard to get any kind of medical support or any medical help,” Wrenne said.
In contrast to county and state tests, San Jose State University Moss Landing Marine Labs researchers sampled soil at a number of sites close to the plant and found a spike in the concentrations of three toxic heavy metals. They were hundreds to a thousand times higher than before the fire.
UC Santa Cruz environmental toxicology professor Don Smith said there are a couple of reasons why the test results from the state and SJSU appear contradictory. For one, they sampled different locations. Also, SJSU researchers only analyzed the topmost layer of soil. State tests included deeper samples, so some results showed diluted metal levels.
Smith said people are right to want more clarity.
“Collectively, the data that we've seen…indicates that not enough has been done to determine what the risk to me may be, if I was a resident in that area,” he said.
At elevated exposures, the heavy metals found in lithium batteries can be toxic, according to Smith. He said they can cause respiratory issues and increase the risk of neurological disorders and developmental delays in children.
Vistra, the company that owns the plant, did not respond to questions about the safety of their operations but said they will continue sharing test results.
A group of people who live near the plant have sued. They say Vistra failed to take proper safety measures.
