The News

 A fire was confirmed at the Vistra Power Plant in Moss Landing on Thursday, forcing evacuations and closing roads in the area.

The fire was reported shortly after 3 p.m. The building was evacuated when the fire started. All Vistra employees, law and fire personnel are safe, per the County of Monterey.

Firefighters are not engaging the fire and are waiting for it to burn out on its own. It is unknown how long the fire will last.

KSBW's Joyce Kim said that as of early Friday morning, the flames have died down considerably, compared to Thursday afternoon, but there is still smoke and the fire is still burning in the area.

Emergency responders are staged in the area.

A spokesperson with the Monterey County Sheriff's Office told KSBW 8 that 40% of the battery plant has burned.

The County of Monterey’s Board of Supervisors will hold an emergency meeting at the Castroville Library at 8:30 a.m. Friday to discuss the fire. Fire officials and the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. to give an update.

Moments Fire Erupted in Moss Landing

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The owner of the battery plant, Vistra, gave the following statement to KSBW 8:

"There is an ongoing fire at our Moss Landing Power Plant site. Our top priority is the safety of the community and our personnel, and Vistra deeply appreciates the continued assistance of our local emergency responders.

"Earlier this afternoon, Vistra personnel called for assistance from the North Monterey County Fire District after a fire was detected in the 300-MW Phase I energy storage facility at the Moss Landing Power Plant site. All site personnel were safely evacuated.    

"The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but an investigation will begin once the fire is extinguished."

Earlier on Thursday afternoon, Vistra personnel called for assistance from the North Monterey County Fire District after a fire was detected in the 300-MW Phase I energy storage facility at the Moss Landing Power Plant site. All site personnel were safely evacuated.    

The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but an investigation will begin once the fire is extinguished.

The county of Monterey sent the following message to residents in the area:

"North County Fire Department is currently responding to a fire at Moss Landing Power Plant. Out of an abundance of caution, the fire department urges residents in Zones MRY-B047 and MRY-B053 to close windows and doors and shut off air systems until further notice. Residents are also requested to stay out of the area to allow for access of emergency vehicles."

See what zone you are in, HERE.

"Santa Cruz County Public Health officials advise residents to stay indoors, keep windows and doors closed, limit outdoor exposure, and turn off ventilation systems. Monitor local news and social media for additional updates. Further information will be provided as the situation changes," according to a CruzAware message sent out to Santa Cruz County residents.

Monterey County health officials have also advised residents to stay indoors, keep windows and doors closed, limit outdoor exposure, and turn off ventilation systems

San Benito County says there is no immediate threat to residents in the county.

"We are monitoring closely and in contact with the National Weather Service and neighboring counties and following their recommendations," said the county.

Road Closures

• Caltrans says both ways of Highway 1 at Salinas Road is currently closed due to a fire at the Moss Landing power plant. Use Highway 101 instead advises CHP.
• Hard closure at Highway 183 (Merritt Road)
• Hard closure at Dolan Road at Castroville Boulevard.
• Highway 1 at Struve Road is closed.
• Paradise at Walker Valley Road.
• Elkhorn at Bayview Road.
• Elkhorn at Walker Valley Road.
• Elkhorn at Strawberry Road.
• Elkhorn at Hidden Valley Road.
• Elkhorn Rd between Kirby Road and Wauh Road.
• Elkhorn at the intersection of Hall Road at the fire station.
• Russo Road at Dolan Road
• Trafton Road to Bluff Road

There is no estimate for when the roads will be reopened.

Evacuation Orders

There are now evacuation orders for areas off Moss Landing south of Elkhorn Slough, north of Molera Road and Monterey Dunes Way and west of Castroville Boulevard and Elkhorn Road to the ocean.

There are 1,214 people in the evacuation zone, per the Monterey County Sheriff's Office. A total of 7,676 acres are under evacuation. The Sheriff's office says they have completed their evacuations.

School Closures

North Monterey County Unified School District announced that all of its schools and district offices are closed on Friday. There is a holiday on Monday, but after that, they will assess whether they need to remain closed.

Hartnell College will also close its Castroville Education Center on Friday due to the fire.

Pajaro Valley Unified School District said all its schools will remain open on Friday. It will monitor air quality and will update families with any updates.

Director-writer David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and network television with “Twin Peaks,” has died. He was 78.

Lynch revealed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, and would likely not be able to leave his house to direct any longer. His family announced his death in a Facebook post, writing, “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'”

The “Twin Peaks” TV show and films such as “Blue Velvet,” “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive” melded elements of horror, film noir, the whodunit and classical European surrealism. Lynch wove tales, not unlike those of his Spanish predecessor Luis Bunuel, which proceeded with their own impenetrable logic.

A four-time Oscar nominee, Lynch received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2020.

After years spent as a painter and a maker of short animated and live action films, Lynch burst onto the scene with his 1977 feature debut “Eraserhead,” a horrific, black-humored work that became a disturbing fixture on the midnight movie circuit. His outré and uncompromising style quickly won the attention of the Hollywood and international movie-making establishment.

He was hired by Mel Brooks’ production company to write and direct “The Elephant Man,” a deeply affecting drama about a horrifically deformed sideshow freak in Victorian England who became a national celebrity. The feature captured eight Academy Award nominations, including Lynch’s first for best director.

He found less success with his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling science fiction novel “Dune.” The production, made on a budget of $40 million during an arduous three-year shoot, was a colossal box office flop.

However, Lynch rebounded from the disaster with two films that defined his mature style: “Blue Velvet” (1986), a frightening hellride through the psychosexual underbelly of a small American town, and the sexed-up, violent road movie “Wild at Heart” (1990), which was honored with the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or.

In 1990, he revolutionized American episodic TV with “Twin Peaks,” a series he created with writer Mark Frost. With action springing from the investigation of a high school girl’s mysterious murder in a Washington lumber mill town, the weekly ABC show plumbed disquieting, theretofore taboo subject matter and made the inexplicable a fixture of modern narrative television.

Lynch’s first feature after “Twin Peaks,” 1990’s “Wild at Heart,” was an oddball exodus, based on a novel by Barry Gifford, in which an Elvis-fixated ex-con (Nicolas Cage) and his hot-to-trot girlfriend (Laura Dern) are pursued by the murderous minions of the girl’s jealous mother (Dern’s own mother Diane Ladd). Domestic reaction was mixed to the gory, sexually frank mix of “Detour” and “The Wizard of Oz,” but the Cannes jury was wowed.

Lynch’s association with Gifford continued with “Lost Highway,” for which the two collaborated on an original screenplay. A doppelganger murder mystery that foreshadowed “Mulholland Drive,” the disquieting, brutally effective thriller starred Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty and Patricia Arquette as the players in a homicidal foursome.

After spending most of the decade on the far side of narrative coherence, Lynch came back down to earth with “The Straight Story,” the first feature in which he took no hand in writing. In the incongruously Disney-distributed picture, based on a true story, Richard Farnsworth starred as an Iowa man who drives from Iowa to Wisconsin on a power mower to visit his seriously ill brother.

Though not a major hit, the film was critically well received, and proved to Lynch’s naysayers that he was capable of bringing life to material that was not extravagantly outrageous. Farnsworth received an Oscar nomination for his performance; the veteran actor and stunt man, who was suffering from terminal prostate cancer during the production of the film, died by suicide in 2000.