Monterey Officials Lift Shelter-in-Place Order, End Road Closure Prompted by Power Plant Fire
Monterey County officials have lifted a shelter-in-place order prompted by a fire Friday morning at the Moss Landing Power Plant.
Firefighters from the North County Fire Protection District were dispatched to the Vistra Energy battery storage after 6:15 a.m., according to a release from the agency and the emergency warning center.
Shelter-in-place orders were issued for the surrounding areas and the North Monterey County School District, as the county’s emergency management department coordinated with local, state and federal agencies. Traffic on Highway 1 in the Moss Landing area was impacted, and motorists were asked to avoid the area to allow emergency crews access.
The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office said Friday afternoon that the order and a road closure had been removed.
Officials said the fire was not nearly as big as a 2025 fire at the same Vistra battery storage plant, which burned for days and produced a plume of black smoke that was visible for miles. But some of the batteries damaged in that fire were “heavily involved” in the current blaze, according to North County Fire Protection District Chief Jess Cortez.
The facility has been closed since the January 2025 fire destroyed over half of the approximately 100,000 batteries onsite, according to Vistra. Most of the remaining batteries have been removed and recycled in an ongoing cleanup effort. But about 5,000 are still onsite.
“Those always have been at 100% capacity energized,” Cortez said during a Friday briefing. “So we actually had a good general idea of what the involvement could be.”
Cortez said hundreds of batteries damaged during the 2025 Vistra battery fire “spontaneously ignited” Friday morning.
Kazami Brockman with the U.S Environmental Protection Agency told reporters that the agency’s air monitoring sites in the area had not detected concentrations of anything that exceeded healthy levels.
Following the 2025 fire, scientists found that concentrations of metals were between 10 and 10,000 greater than before. Nearby residents complained of nausea and headaches.
“People do remain concerned,” County Supervisor Glenn Church said. “It is frustrating that it continues to happen.”
Officials said that they expected the current fire to burn itself out by today. Cortez said the batteries were “in the smoldering stage.”
“The incident is very dynamic. There could be flare-ups, but that’s to be determined in the future,” Cortez said.
It’s still not clear what caused the 2025 fire or the Friday fire.
This is a developing story and will be updated.