A fresh fire broke out on Friday, September 18, 2026, at Vistra’s Moss Landing battery site on California’s Central Coast, less than two years after the January 2025 blaze that became one of the largest battery facility fires on record. Monterey County ordered nearby residents to shelter in place that morning and lifted the order at 4 p.m. the same day. No injuries were reported.
County officials said the new fire “involves batteries that were previously damaged” in 2025 and is “not comparable” in size to that event, and they expected it to burn out over the next 24 hours, as Canary Media relayed. The distinction matters to a community that has spent nearly two years living beside a decommissioning site, with air monitoring stations, a private fire crew posted around the clock and a steady stream of cleanup traffic along Highway 1 as constants of daily life, and where each new plume recalls the January 2025 fire.
A fire inside the cleanup zone
The blaze started shortly after 6:15 a.m. on the north wall of the Moss 300 building at 7301 Highway 1, while crews were dismantling the damaged plant, according to CBS News San Francisco. North County Fire Division Chief Jess Cortez described the early scene as “hot, smoldering at this particular point,” adding that the incident could still “decrease or continue going.”
The shelter-in-place order was issued at about 7:30 a.m. and covered roughly 106 residents within a third of a mile, Monterey County Now reported. Officials activated air quality monitors, temporarily shut down the site’s natural gas plant as a precaution, and noted that battery fires cannot be put out with water.
Reports differ on how much fuel the fire had. CalMatters said about 1,200 charged battery modules left from the January 2025 fire spontaneously ignited against a building wall, and Fire Chief Cortez described them as “in the smoldering stage” with possible flare-ups. Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Morro Bay Democrat, put the figure at 1,500 hard-to-reach batteries still in the damaged area.
What was left after removal of 34,000 modules
The fire came while Vistra was well along in removing the wreckage. Canary Media reported that workers had pulled 34,000 of the site’s 39,000 battery modules for recycling, leaving about 5,000, some potentially still holding residual charge. Vistra has said removal of the intact batteries should finish by the end of 2026.
Addis was blunt about the setback, saying she was “frustrated and deeply concerned by the repeat fire at Moss Landing,” according to CBS News. Glenn Church of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors said he was “deeply disappointed and frustrated” and that energy storage systems “must be safe at all times.”
Canary Media also spoke with a nearby resident who said it “seemed like once a year there’d be some smoldering going on.” CalMatters counted this as the facility’s fourth safety incident since 2019, three of them on Vistra property. The adjacent PG&E Elkhorn battery plant, offline since 2025 and scheduled to resume operating on July 1, 2027, said the new fire did not start on or spread to its property.
The 2025 fire that set the baseline
The original fire began on January 16, 2025, in a lithium-ion energy storage system holding roughly 100,000 batteries. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says about 55 percent of the batteries were damaged, and that its air monitoring from January 17 to 20 found results not exceeding health standards. EPA has overseen Vistra’s battery removal under an enforceable agreement signed July 17, 2025, and its page, last reviewed on September 25, 2026, describes the start of a final phase of post-fire cleanup, with a private firefighting company kept on site around the clock.
Canary Media noted that the Moss Landing system used older nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry, while newer installations tend toward lithium iron phosphate in modular containers. The cause of the 2025 fire is still undetermined, and the California Public Utilities Commission’s investigation continues nearly two years on.
Environmental questions have not closed either. CalMatters reported that Vistra’s commissioned study found chemical concentrations posed no environmental risk, while San Jose State University marine researchers detected elevated nickel, manganese and cobalt in surrounding soil, and UC Santa Cruz researchers found elevated battery-related metals in residents’ hair samples.
Whether the September 18 fire was the last flare-up depends on the modules still on site. Removing the final roughly 5,000, including the hard-to-reach ones Addis described, is the step that ends the risk of another smolder, and the end-of-2026 completion date Vistra has given is the milestone to watch. Until the Public Utilities Commission names a cause for the 2025 fire, the question of how these particular batteries reignite will stay partly open.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
- Amazon’s Prime refunds are rising to $200 as millions more customers become eligible
- A handful of car engines are so tough mechanics say they almost never wear out
- The NSA is again telling phone owners to switch off one location setting
- Supplements now rank as the fifth-leading cause of death from liver disease.
