Three days after a battery fire broke out at the Moss Landing Power Plant, owner/operator Vistra reports the fire is contained and just smoldering with no new flames.
Caltrans reopened Highway 1 in Moss Landing effective at 5pm Sunday, Jan. 19.
(Drivers are encouraged to use caution in the area as emergency vehicles are still onsite.)
The fire began at about 3pm on Thursday, Jan. 16 in the 300-megawatt storage unit, known as Moss 300. The burned facility—as well as Vistra's 100-megawatt site and 350-megawatt site, plus the natural gas plant—all currently remain offline. (Elected officials have called on the company to keep the entire plant offline until the cause of the fire is understood and Vistra can provide assurances a similar incident will not happen in the future.)
Evacuation orders were lifted on Friday, about 24 hours after they were issued, based on initial air quality monitoring data showing no immediate risk to health.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has nine monitoring locations for the incident, looking for particulate matter and hydrofluoric acid (HF) at the following locations: two in the Vistra plant; four locations around the perimeter, one in each direction; three in neighboring communities (Pajaro, Prunedale and Castroville).
Vistra has created an incident response website with updates at mosslandingresponse.com. The County of Monterey is operating an incident information phone line at 831-769-8700.
(1) comment
Whether a battery storage facility should operate at this location is a question.
But what is certain, is that Vistra should not be allowed to operate in this region. This is the fourth ultra-hazardous fire in five years. These fires and this last one in particular spew toxins into the air, the water, the soil and harm human and animal life.
Have the agricultural crops and livestock grown nearby been contaminated with the toxic fall out from this fire. Has our aquafer been contaminated? Is local water safe to drink?
When lithium batteries burn, they primarily release toxic hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas along with other potentially harmful gases like carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and depending on the battery composition, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), making the smoke from a burning lithium battery highly dangerous to inhale.
Rarely has mismanagement on this scale been so obvious.
Vistra is not competent to manage this facility.
No surprise, they sell to the massively mismanaged PGE, that has played a role in the enormous wildfires in California over the past decade. And PGE supplied the CEO to the LA Water and Power Company who mismanaged the supply of water in the LA fires.
Recently, it has been reported that PGE blocks collection of solar power because it does not have capacity to store it.
One can only imagine with the Moss Landing site offline, the situation will only get worse.
Vistra is from Texas, home Turner Construction and Demolition who was "retrofitting" the WTC prior to 9/11, and home of the Bush, Jr, who managed 9/11 and the twenty years wars for oil and opium in Iraq and Afghanistan, which mostly benefited British Petroleum, who had been looked out of Iraq for fortyish years until soonafter the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before the invasion Iraq was producing about 10 million barrels of oil per year, but after Iraq had been producing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil each year. And after the war in Afghanistan, we now have had for several years over a hundred thousand overdose deaths per year in the US, many of these started with heroin from Afghanistan, later advanced to fentynl.
Why does our government come up with so many wrong headed policies?
Follow the money.
And send Vistra back to Texas.
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