California is pushing hard to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. Battery energy storage systems are a key part of the state’s strategy—they store excess electricity produced by solar panels and wind farms so it can be used when needed. But after several fires at battery plants throughout the state, people are starting to push back against the facilities in their communities. Planned or proposed projects in places including rural Santa Cruz County, Orange County, and Petaluma are facing public opposition, leaving local officials racing to adopt regulations for the plants. In Monterey County, the January 2025 Vistra battery fire has left residents with more questions than answers.
On the afternoon of Jan. 16, 2025, the Vistra battery plant in Moss Landing erupted in flames. This was the third time in less than four years that Vistra’s fire suppression system had failed.
But, in contrast to the earlier incidents—in 2021 and 2022—this time, a massive fire broke out, pumping thick, black smoke into the air.
“As soon as I opened the door, I got hit with burnt plastic,” said Sherry Okamoto, a resident of Royal Oaks, when KAZU spoke with her in February.
“I’ve had a lot of difficulty breathing. My heart rate will jump up like crazy,” said Jen Wrenne, who lived in the Aptos Hills at the time. She has since moved out of state, in part because she felt her health concerns were dismissed.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders for about 1,200 Moss Landing residents on the evening of Jan. 16. Those orders were lifted a few days later, once the fire subsided.
At a press briefing two days into the fire, Olivia Trombadore of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said air quality monitoring did not show dangerous levels of particulate matter or hydrogen fluoride.
“We have not seen any levels of these two contaminants that would pose a risk to the public,” she said.
The EPA’s air monitoring, as well as the air sampling performed by Vistra’s consultant CTEH, which tested for specific metals, only occurred in the immediate vicinity of the battery plant. That’s because the locations were chosen based on a model of the fire’s soot plume that only stretched up to a few thousand feet from the plant.
In a Monterey County health survey that was open from Feb. 19 to Mar. 16, 1,275 responders reported experiencing at least one symptom after the fire. The reported symptoms include headaches, itchy eyes, shortness of breath, and even the lingering taste of metal. Most of the respondents lived well beyond the soot plume modeling area.
“We abandoned our house 12 days after the fire,” said local resident Brian Roeder, who spoke to KAZU in December.
Roeder and his family decided to leave Prunedale, about 8 miles east of the battery plant, after Roeder’s wife started feeling sick. Soon after, Roeder and several other community members started a group called Never Again Moss Landing (NAML).
“We want to know what happened to people, to the environment, to the animals,” Roeder said.
These questions have been top of mind for many Monterey County residents over the past year. But for the most part, we still don’t know the answers.
In the months after the fire, county, state, and federal agencies—and Vistra, via contractors—tested water, soil, air, and surface wipe samples. The picture these results paint can be summed up like this: people don’t need to worry, the findings so far generally don’t raise cause for concern.
But a lot of people remain skeptical, including Roeder.
“The official message that nothing happened is, in my opinion, criminal,” he said.
“It's politically inconvenient, and that is the reason,” said Glenn Church, Monterey County Supervisor for District 2, which includes Moss Landing, in an interview at his office in early January.
Church has spent much of the last year advocating for more transparency into what caused the fire and what impacts it had.
Both Vistra and the California Public Utilities Commission have been investigating the cause of the fire, but the investigations remain ongoing.
KAZU repeatedly tried to reach Vistra for this story, but they never responded. The company faces several lawsuits over the fire.
Another Vistra consultant, Terraphase Engineering, is expected to release a preliminary environmental assessment report in the coming weeks based on the testing conducted so far.
There are two main reasons why Church, Roeder, and others don’t fully trust the official test results. One, more than a thousand people said they got sick after the fire. Two, there was another set of test results—a peer-reviewed paper by scientists at Moss Landing Marine Labs—that complicates the picture.
“The paper demonstrates that there was a heavy metal fallout related to the fire,” said Ivano Aiello, the lead author of the study, in September.
He found that levels of nickel, cobalt, and manganese—the primary metals in the burned batteries—skyrocketed in Elkhorn Slough shortly after the fire.
Roeder and NAML hired an independent environmental testing company in Utah to analyze surface wipe samples they took the week after the fire broke out.
“The testing we did with the community showed these enormous elevations,” he said, adding that their results lined up with Aiello’s.
Now, a year later, the community is left to make sense of two conflicting narratives—one based on a large body of testing from government agencies and Vistra’s contractors, and another based on NAML’s sampling and the peer-reviewed findings of world-renowned scientists.
Church thinks the barrage of different information without clear takeaways has created space for people to believe whichever narrative they prefer.
“We have to learn from it and move forward, and I just don't think that's happening, and that's what concerns me,” he said.
He’s been urging the county to develop an ordinance that would regulate new battery energy storage facilities, to preserve as much local control as possible.
Roeder says Church has been the only official to really engage with NAML in the aftermath of the fire.
“The information’s there, and it’s being disregarded,” Roeder said. “At the end of the day, it's the people in the community who are still sick, and the people who will never know why it is that they get very sick because of this, that haunts me, quite frankly.”
