Hunterbrook Media’s investment affiliate, Hunterbrook Capital did not take any positions related to this article. Hunterbrook Media is in talks with litigation firms exploring a potential lawsuit based on our reporting. If you are a victim, we invite you to share your story by emailing ideas@hntrbrk.com — where we source information for ongoing reporting.
In an email on Friday, a Monterey County spokesperson said that she would not ask Vistra’s representatives questions from Hunterbrook Media at the weekly County news briefing moving forward.
“I have been informed that Vistra is not responding to your direct inquiries and will not respond to them in any venue,” the Monterey County spokesperson wrote. “The County Communications Bureau has decided to respect Vistra’s decision and while you are welcome to participate in the briefing and ask questions of any of our other participants, if you pose a question for Vistra, I will not ask it.”
Hunterbrook covered the fallout from a January 16 fire and a February 18 flare-up at Vistra’s Moss Landing battery storage facility. Local residents have reported symptoms ranging from sore throats to headaches and nosebleeds that they say are caused by the battery fire.
Among other findings, Hunterbrook uncovered that the company is working with FTI Consulting — a global crisis management firm with a history of running influence campaigns for fossil fuel companies — to manage its crisis PR.
Vistra has not responded to Hunterbrook’s several requests for comment. Company spokespeople have been attending the weekly County news briefings since the fire to share updates and answer reporters’ questions, including Hunterbrook’s, until now.
At the February 26 County news briefing, Hunterbrook asked Vistra representatives about statements they had made at the briefing two weeks prior. Cynthia Vodopivec, senior vice president of environmental, health, and safety at Vistra, had said that Vistra’s Moss Landing facility meets OSHA work safety standards, citing air monitoring and surface wipe sampling for metals conducted by CTEH, a third-party consultancy hired by the company. Enhanced personal protective gear requirements for Vistra employees and visitors adopted after the fire have been removed based on CTEH’s findings, according to Vodopivec. Brad Watson, senior director of community affairs at Vistra, had said that the testing information would be made available on its incident response website later that day.
Two weeks later, the information still had not been added to Vistra’s website. When the Hunterbrook reporter followed up with Watson, he walked his statement back. “We’ll review that and look into whether we’ll put it on the website or not,” Watson said.
It appears this information still has not been publicized.
At the March 5 news briefing, Hunterbrook asked Vistra about the timeline for demolishing the building that’s housing the batteries damaged by the fire. Eric Sandusky, an on-scene coordinator with the U.S. EPA, said that 60% of accessible batteries at the facility had been disconnected and isolated from one another to mitigate the risk of another flare-up. But the remaining batteries are in damaged parts of the building and can’t be accessed safely before the damaged facility is demolished. “Vistra is responsible for securing the contractor to perform this demolition,” Sandusky said.
When asked about the demolition timeline, Watson said Vistra is currently considering vendors. “We’re going to be very methodical on how to move through this process, since it’s not been done on this scale before, so there’s not going to be, for a while, a schedule if you will. I would say broadly, think of months and not weeks,” he said.
During that time, the risk of another fire remains high.
“Given the damage at the facility and that the remaining batteries are still linked together in racks, we know that it is likely that other flare-ups will occur,” the EPA’s Sandusky said.
Now Vistra has decided it will not answer any Hunterbrook questions moving forward. True to form, the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Explanation of Update (03/14/25): An earlier version of this article stated that Vistra had requested the Monterey County Communications Bureau to ignore Hunterbrook Media questions at the news briefing. The County followed up to clarify that Vistra had told the Monterey County Communications Bureau that it would no longer answer Hunterbrook questions, and the County had therefore decided to “respect Vistra’s decision” and not address any Hunterbrook questions for Vistra representatives at the news briefing. The article has been revised to incorporate that context.
Till Daldrup is an investigative journalist who joined Hunterbrook from The Wall Street Journal, where he focused on open-source investigations and content verification. In 2023, he was part of a team of reporters who won a Gerald Loeb Award for an investigation that revealed how Russia is stealing grain from occupied parts of Ukraine. He has an M.A. in Journalism from New York University and a B.S. in Social Sciences from University of Cologne. He’s also an alum of the Cologne School of Journalism (Kölner Journalistenschule).
Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books with former United States Attorney General Eric Holder and former United States Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. He helped build Fenway Strategies into one of the preeminent strategic communications firms in the country—with side quests speechwriting for Michael Bloomberg, running the surrogate remarks operation on the Biden-Harris campaign, and co-founding Mayday, which is now one of the leading information providers on how to access reproductive health care in states with bans. Sam has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets — and occasionally volunteers on a fire speech for a good cause. He has a BA in Government from Harvard, where he was named a John Harvard Scholar and wrote op-eds like “Shut Down Harvard Football,” which he tells us were great for his social life.