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A large fire burning on Friday at one of the world’s largest battery storage plants in northern California is sending up flames of toxic smoke, leading to the evacuation of 1,700 people and the closure of a major highway.
The blaze in Moss Landing started on Thursday. Fire crews were not engaging with the fire but were waiting for it to burn out on its own, the Mercury News reported.
The blaze was still burning on Friday and it had not gone beyond the facility, according to the Monterey county spokesperson, Nicholas Pasculli. As of late Thursday, a few dozen people were at a temporary evacuation center and the rest had gone to friends or family or made other arrangements, Pasculli said.
County health officials warned residents late on Thursday “to stay indoors, keep windows and doors closed, limit outdoor exposure, and turn off ventilation systems”.
The Moss Landing Power Plant, located about 77 miles (125km) south of San Francisco, is owned by the Texas-based company Vistra Corp and contains tens of thousands of lithium batteries. The batteries are important for storing electricity from such renewable energy sources as solar energy, but if they go up in flames the blazes can be extremely difficult to put out.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” the Monterey county supervisor, Glenn Church, told KSBW-TV. But he said he did not expect the fire to spread beyond the concrete building it was enclosed in.
The county board of supervisors held an emergency meeting on Friday morning to receive a briefing on the fire. “I can update that most of that fire burned out through the night,” the local fire chief, Joel Mendoza, said at the briefing.
Church, the county official, said at a news conference on Friday that the fire was not acceptable. “This is really a lot more than just a fire; it’s really a wake-up call for this industry,” Church said. “If we’re going to be moving ahead with sustainable energy, we need to have safe battery systems in place.
“This is the fourth fire at that site since 2019,” he added. “There are two battery operations going on there and both of them have had fires, and this has got to be the last one.”
There were fires at the Vistra plant in 2021 and 2022 that were caused by a fire sprinkler system malfunction that resulted in some units overheating, according to the Mercury News.
It was unclear what caused this latest fire. Vistra said in a statement that after it was detected, everyone at the site was evacuated safely. After the fire is out, an investigation will begin.
“Our top priority is the safety of the community and our personnel, and Vistra deeply appreciates the continued assistance of our local emergency responders,” Jenny Lyon, a spokesperson for Vistra, said in a statement.
North Monterey county unified school district announced that all schools and offices would be closed on Friday due to the fire.
