CLEANUP WORK CONTINUES at the Vistra Moss Landing Battery Energy Storage System facility nearly a year after a major fire forced the temporary evacuation of over a thousand residents. With a large lawsuit pending, many residents in the area are still looking for accountability, oversight and tighter safeguards against another fire.

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors received an update Tuesday from the county’s director of emergency management, Kelsey Scanlon, about the fire that erupted on Jan. 16, 2025.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.