The long process begins toward a careful, calculated recovery from the Vistra Fire.

Nearly six weeks after a battery fire ignited inside a building at Vistra’s Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility on Jan. 16, the site remains volatile. On the evening of Feb. 18, a flare-up fire ignited inside the same building, smoldering within an area that had already burned a month earlier, before finally petering out around 2am Feb. 19.

Just three days later, on Feb. 22, a specially trained team hired by Vistra, and under the direction of the U.S. EPA, began what is expected to be a two-week process to “de-link” undamaged batteries from the system – essentially, that means unbolting the metal plates connecting the batteries to each other. Per a Vistra website (mosslandingresponse.com) about the company’s response to the fire, the de-linking will mitigate “the risk of individual batteries interacting with other batteries and reducing the potential for flare-ups.”

The de-linking will start on the west end of the first floor of the three-story building, which before the fire housed 100,000 lithium batteries. The two weeks is only the first phase and will address about half of the batteries in the structure. The remaining batteries are in areas that are structurally unsafe and won’t be de-linked until after demolition.

Speaking at a county briefing Feb. 26, Eric Sandusky, U.S. EPA's on-scene coordinator for the cleanup, said the de-linking should be done within 10 days, after which an emergency demolition permit can be applied for to clear the remains of the building, parts of which are structurally unsafe. Sandusky says that how to dispose of the batteries once they ultimately removed from the site is still being worked out.  

The adjacent battery power plant, PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Energy Storage System, is likewise shut down, as fallout from the fire rained down on the site. Paul Doherty, a PG&E spokesperson, says the company is still assessing the fallout’s impact, and says there’s no clear estimate for a cleanup timeline, or whether the plant could be operational before 2026.

On Tuesday, Feb. 25, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pursue the safety recommendations of an ad hoc committee, and provide monthly public updates.

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Editor's Note 2/27/25: This article has been updated from its original version to remove information provided by a consultant not authorized to comment on behalf of Vistra, and to add new information that U.S. EPA provided at a county briefing on Feb. 26 after the story went to print. The Weekly originally reported that only about a third of the batteries would be de-linked in the initial phase; on Feb. 26, the estimate was updated to about one-half.