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Smoke started rising from “a previously burned section” of Vistra’s Moss Landing battery facility around 6:30 p.m., according to Monterey County. Firefighters are on-site to determine the source and cause of the incident, using drones to assess the situation.
The County said the smoke appears to be coming from batteries that had already burned in January and hasn’t spread to modules that are still intact.
“We can taste it choking us,” wrote one member of the community on Facebook.
“Please don’t wait to self evacuate,” another wrote.
CTEH, a third-party consultancy hired by Vistra after the fire in January, is monitoring the air quality at the facility and in the surrounding community. Vistra said on its incident response website that “no hazardous air conditions have been detected” and that batteries at the site remain offline. The company’s adjacent gas plant had still been operational, according to the website — but that language appears to have been removed this morning. Vistra did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Local residents shared a text message they received from Monterey County at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, telling them to close windows and doors overnight “out of an abundance of caution.” An earlier notification regarding smoke at the facility had been sent out around 8:40 p.m.
While the text message said there’s “light smoke” at the Vistra facility, images and videos reviewed by Hunterbrook show an orange glow and a smoke plume rising more than 500 feet into the night air. Videos from this morning show the smoke has subsided but continues to emerge from the facility. It is unclear what caused the facility to reignite.
No evacuation orders had been issued by the time of publication. Highway 1 remained open and so did schools in the North Monterey County Unified School District, serving the communities surrounding the Vistra facility.
“I’m looking at a school bus full of children four cars ahead of me headed straight for the plant and I’m about 4 miles from the plant,” local Matt McFaul wrote Hunterbrook.
Hunterbrook found and geolocated footage of a school bus traveling on Highway 1 at Moss Landing at 6:59 a.m. local time. Based on its direction of travel, the bus likely came within a few hundred feet of the fire along Highway 1 and drove under the rising smoke plume.
People were surfing and fishing close to the facility this morning, according to McFaul. “And they’re not wearing any protection at all. Absolutely zero police presence,” he wrote Hunterbrook.
Some residents said they didn’t get a notification about the fire from the County. Sherry Okamoto told Hunterbrook, “Apparently they sent announcements. Of course, I didn’t get one.” Okamoto is based in Royal Oaks, about seven miles from the Vistra facility.
She began experiencing the same symptoms she had following the first fire in January. “I’m sicker than a dog … Fever, metallic taste. My throat, my chest, my eyes.” She said she’d written Governor Gavin Newsom and Congressman Jimmy Panetta to no avail: “Nobody’s answering. We’re just sitting ducks.”
The reignition comes just over a month after an inferno at the facility, one of the largest in the world. 1,200 people in surrounding areas had to evacuate. Highway 1 was closed. The fire continued for several days. The investigation into what caused the fire is ongoing.
At a news briefing last week, Joel Mendoza, chief of the North County Fire Protection District, said that Vistra had been monitoring the facility with thermal imaging drones. Vistra had also hired a private fire department that he said is on-site around the clock and replaced local first responders about a week and a half after the January fire. He said that rainy conditions over the past few weeks were “a concern” for the fire department.
The fire reignited on the same day the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, a specialized department within the California EPA, confirmed elevated cobalt levels near the Vistra facility following the January fire.
Hunterbrook has previously reported on testing by San José State University researchers that also indicated elevated levels of heavy metals in surrounding soil, as well as community-organized surface sample testing that showed elevated cobalt, nickel, and manganese concentrations near Vistra’s facility.
Authors
Till Daldrup joined Hunterbrook from The Wall Street Journal, where he focused on open-source investigations and content verification. In 2023, he was part of a team of reporters who won a Gerald Loeb Award for an investigation that revealed how Russia is stealing grain from occupied parts of Ukraine. He has an M.A. in Journalism from New York University and a B.S. in Social Sciences from University of Cologne. He’s also an alum of the Cologne School of Journalism (Kölner Journalistenschule). Till is based in New York.
Blake Spendley joined Hunterbrook from the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), where he led investigations as a Research Specialist for the Marine Corps and US Navy. He built and owns the leading open-source intelligence (OSINT) account on X/Twitter, called @OSINTTechnical (>925K followers), which now distributes Hunterbrook Media content. His OSINT research has been published in Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, among other top business outlets. He has a BA in Political Science from USC.
Michelle Cera is a sociologist specializing in digital ethnography and pedagogy. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology from New York University, building on her Bachelor of Arts degree with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently serving as a Workshop Coordinator at NYU’s Anthropology and Sociology Departments, Michelle fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and advances innovative research methodologies.
Editor
Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books with former United States Attorney General Eric Holder and former United States Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Sam has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets — and occasionally volunteers on a fire speech for a good cause. He has a BA in Government from Harvard, where he was named a John Harvard Scholar and wrote op-eds like “Shut Down Harvard Football,” which he tells us were great for his social life. Sam is based in New York.
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