Big fire at California battery plant prompts evacuations amid toxic smoke
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 early 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.
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.
