People don’t talk enough about the risk of fire. The crazy thing is when a battery installation catches fire they don’t actually fight the fire. They just have to let it burn out. The resulting environmental damage is terrible.
This happened recently in the Central Valley. I can’t remember the name of the battery site but it was a huge one, and literally right next door to one of the largest Driscolls strawberry farms, on which black lithium smoke settled all over , over the course of several days/weeks in the middle of the summer.
Correct, it wasn't the Central Valley, it was Moss Landing.
Though there were lots of fears about the fire, the biggest risk was that the battery was destroyed. There has been ongoing soil testing and not much found, in this worst case situation of a battery fire.
It is definitely fueling fears, however! A few highly motivated individuals put up big hand painted signs in their neighborhoods decrying the evils of batteries, and the terrible fires they cause. It's enough fear mongering that visitors to popular beaches 20 miles upwind, were imagining metallic tastes in the air months afterwards.
Did they test the air or just the soil? You mentioned they imagined the taste of the air but didn’t mention if they actually tested the air. And who tests it?
As with all testing of this sort that I've ever seen, third parties do the testing and analysis.
I mention the air as an example of fear getting out waaaaaay in front of any risks. Testing the air would be pointless, 20 miles upwind. The metallic taste was either from other sources or psychosomatic.
The health risks of battery fires have been mostly evaluated in the context of fire fighting, where, air metals are a concern, but only in confined spaces. Nickel is the primary concern there. After reading about these, my only fears were for the workers for nickel production.
I am very very concerned about air quality, but the real risk there is from car traffic, specifically the tire microplastics and brake dust. There are big and measurable health effects from that, where even reducing traffic near schools by 10% could actually impact lives. However because people drive cars and are used to the bad health effects, nobody is scared of the negative health from cars. Instead the human mind focuses on new things because they are new, not because of the relative risk. For decades there were natural gas smokestacks pouring exhaust over the strawberry fields, the batteries that replaced them (to make use of the big power lines) are a huge improvement to human health, even with the fire.
This happened recently in the Central Valley. I can’t remember the name of the battery site but it was a huge one, and literally right next door to one of the largest Driscolls strawberry farms, on which black lithium smoke settled all over , over the course of several days/weeks in the middle of the summer.
Edit: maybe we are talking about the same fire? https://x.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1880277672393412848