Locals near Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing Power Plant noticed anomalies in the days leading up to last month’s lithium ion battery fire at the facility, including dead sea lions with skin lesions, sounds of explosions, chemical smells, and symptoms like burning eyes and throats. Those issues could mean there were problems at Moss Landing even before the blaze broke out, consumer advocate and environmental activist Erin Brockovich said during a Tuesday virtual town hall.
The event demonstrated how, even as Newsom looks to ditch fossil fuels, he is making enemies in the environmentalist movement. Local residents near the lithium battery storage facility have faced some of the same health issues after the Jan. 16 fire at Moss Landing, which sent up thick black smoke and a sharp chemical smell throughout Monterey County. Those symptoms are consistent with exposure to hydrogen fluoride, a compound that can be lethal at high levels, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Soil samples have also found that the flame spewed out heavy metals, with at least one test site accumulating dangerous concentrations.
Lithium batteries are needed to store energy from renewable sources, making them essential to Gov. Gavin Newsom's goal of fully transitioning California's power grid away from fossil fuels by 2045. Regulators predict the state will need 52 gigawatts of battery storage to meet that target—nearly four times the 13.3 it has today.
Environmental activists have largely embraced battery-dependent green technologies like electric cars. In this case, however, the famed environmentalist Brockovich is squaring up against the Newsom administration, arguing that the Moss Landing battery facility caused the health of local residents to suffer.
A legal team from the law firm Singleton Schreiber, which includes Brockovich, filed a lawsuit last week on behalf of four residents against Vistra and other defendants, including the lithium-ion battery-maker LG Energy Solution, and California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric. The firm hosted the virtual town hall in hopes of recruiting more plaintiffs.
"I knew right away something was wrong because so many of you were reporting to my community health book," Brockovich told Monterey County residents on the Zoom call. "Anytime I wake up and I see 50 new emails from the same town, I generally have an idea what’s going on."
Brockovich, known for her work in clinching a $333 million 1996 settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric for water contamination, has advised people across the country on environmental disasters, from East Palestine, Ohio, to Flint, Mich.
Tuesday’s Zoom meeting lasted over two and a half hours, and more than 200 people called in asking Brockovich and attorney Knut Johnson for advice on how to test their water, how to get doctors to help them, and how to assess the safety of food from the surrounding farms in the Salinas Valley—known as "America’s Salad Bowl" because it produces 70 percent of the state’s lettuce.
Others, like local resident Gayle Eisner, detailed strange experiences in the days before the Moss Landing fire.
"We live right next door to the harbor, right next to the beach, and I noticed a lot of sea lions washing up on shore," Eisner said. "They were dead, they had these little red rings around them … kind of similar to a ringworm kind of thing—a skin lesion. I could tell they were not from sharks."
A few days after the fire, "there were three more sea lions and an otter that were dead," she added. "So I kind of started thinking there’s a little trend going on here."
Brockovich said it’s "always concerning when you see animals sick or covered in lesions or tumors or washing up dead when that isn’t something that would be common to the area. That’s generally not common, period."
Another local, Janie Smythe, said she heard an explosion several days before the fire—and faced health issues.
"A bunch of us were having symptoms the three days prior," Smythe said. "We don’t know exactly what was going on, but our eyes were burning and our throats were burning, and it wasn’t like allergies. It was weird."
A woman from Prunedale—some 17 miles from the factory—said her neighborhood group also complained about hearing explosions.
"My gut’s telling me that ... that’s part of it," she said during the Zoom meeting. "There’s issues been going on there that we have not been privy to."
These accounts, which have not yet been reported, could help paint a picture of the battery fire origins, Brockovich said.
"That’s helpful information. It really is," Brockovich said. "You’re there. What you know, what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing, others have too, but that can help ... tell the story as to why."
Vistra Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
Singleton Schreiber’s lawsuit is seeking individually tailored compensation for toxic chemical exposure, property damage, and economic losses on behalf of four plaintiffs who live near Moss Landing. It accuses the corporations of negligence and alleges that the plant’s design—a "contained and roofed building that housed an outdated and dangerous lithium-ion battery storage system"—is similar to storage sites worldwide that have suffered large thermal runaways, fires, and exposures that have killed and injured people. The complaint notes that the Jan. 16 fire is Vistra’s third at the Moss Landing plant since 2021 and claims that this time, the fire suppression system failed to work.
One local, Myrt Hawkins, said during the town hall that the disaster wouldn’t have happened "if our elected officials and our regulatory agencies had done their damn job."
"I would strongly encourage you, whoever had the authority to give those permits be brought to task," she said.
The lawsuit also details health issues the plaintiffs have faced since the fire, including nasal and eye irritation, breathing difficulties, headaches, nosebleeds, sore throats, lung congestion, burning lungs, dizziness, unexplained blood discharge, sores, skin irritation, and more. These symptoms match those recounted by hundreds of locals through a Facebook group, "Moss Landing Power Plant/Vistra Fire Symptoms," which has amassed some 3,500 members. Many are still reporting sickness nearly four weeks after the blaze.
Following the town hall, a resident of Carmel—a town about 22 miles south of the plant—posted in the Facebook group that she was "curious" about the anecdotes from before the fire.
"I smelled a chemical fire and tasted metal in my mouth a day or two prior," she wrote. "I was confused when I found nothing near me, and then especially weirded out when I heard of the battery fire starting so soon after this experience."
When the Moss Landing fire broke out, Monterey County issued an evacuation order, though it was lifted by the next evening. Some residents immediately fled—including a Ukrainian woman who remembers the Chernobyl disaster. Others outside the evacuation zone also left, some even taking their large animals including horses. Those who didn’t move their livestock worry the smoke and fallout could hurt them moving forward, locals said during the virtual town hall.
"We ended up evacuating our animals out on Friday [Jan. 17], and a lot of my friends who came and helped, we all started experiencing symptoms, and we still have symptoms," said a woman who lives outside the evacuation zone but smelled the smoke. "I evacuated all the horses, the sheep, goats, all the things. I don’t know exactly how they were impacted."
The Environmental Protection Agency reported zero air quality threats before handing its monitoring operations over to a private consulting firm retained by Vistra. Monterey County’s own air quality agency meanwhile said the only air downgrades were from people using wood-fired stoves.
But preliminary soil tests around Moss Landing show that smoke from the fire deposited significant levels of heavy metals in the surrounding soils, with one site showing dangerous concentrations of cobalt, the Free Beacon has reported. Olukayode Jegede, an agricultural toxicologist from University of California, Davis, said that suggests there would have been "very high" concentrations of those contaminants in the air when the fires were burning. High cobalt exposure can cause impaired lungs, asthma, interstitial lung disease, breathing difficulties, and wheezing.
A coalition of residents, who have branded their efforts as a movement called "Never Again Moss Landing," tested surrounding areas up to 46 miles from the fire for heavy metal deposits. Using wipe tests, they found the highest concentrations of cobalt, manganese, lithium, and nickel were three to six miles from the battery fire site. They are awaiting scientific analysis of what these levels could mean.
Moreover, nearly a month since the fire, local officials haven't issued health warnings specific to this disaster beyond recommending the immunocompromised or chronically ill to stay indoors or wear masks. This response has frustrated locals, who say it’s stymied their quest to get medical help for their ongoing symptoms.
"Our doctors are clueless," one woman said on Tuesday’s Zoom call, saying that most point to the EPA’s declaration that the air was safe, as do Poison Control and the CDC. "It shut down a lot of help we could have received."