75 years of leaded gasoline dumped billions of tons into the air, and it has settled everywhere. There was also a lot of lead in paints at one time, as well as in plumbing.
Luckily, environmental regulation has stopped all of those uses.
Lead in car batteries contributes virtually nothing to the lead around, and almost none of it ends up in dumpsites.
Correct. Every time I get a new battery (car), they always reclaim the core. Lead is relatively easily recovered from a lead-acid battery.
As for “environmental regulation has stopped all of those uses”, don’t be so sure. EPA is being gutted as we speak. I doubt the public would tolerate lead in plumbing or paints today, but the regulation is not guaranteed to continue under current leadership.
Does sound like they need to shutter Moss. Its history doesn’t inspire confidence.
Agree, but now that it’s a profitable business I don’t think they need to. It wasn’t until the EPA mandated it and got them over the “startup hump.” Now that it’s a going concern I’m not too worried about the “lead acid battery” issue.
There are tons of others which are real and which I am worried about, but “recycling batteries” isn’t one of them.
The El Segundo facility supplies a fifth of all motor vehicle fuels and 40% of the jet fuel consumed in southern California.
DB2
California’s gasoline market is unique in several respects that magnify the impact of such accidents. The state is effectively an island when it comes to refined products…On top of that, California requires its own specialized blend of gasoline to meet stringent environmental standards…
The timing of this fire could hardly be worse for consumers. Inventories of gasoline in California were already running about 10% below their five-year average in late September, according to federal data. Seasonal maintenance at refineries is also underway, which typically reduces output heading into the fall.
DB2
As an aside, mid 1970’s for my first two years after university I lived a surfing paradise life in a tiny apartment on “Crest Drive” atop “El Porto” (yes “the Port”), the narrow narrow narrow strip of beach dunes between the El Segundo refinery and the Pacific coast where smallish tankers frequently anchored via permanent buoyed anchor points off shore, where under sea petroleum pipe attachment points allowed them to send their crude to the refinery.
My front window view was the Ocean, and my back window was of huge storage tanks.
About once a month a waft of nasty smelling air would come out of the plant itself.
Some of the best surfing was often just above a long ago sea storm destroyed concrete and steel dock whose collapsed ruins (the buoys are much less vulnerable) formed a fortuitous “reef” at the end of a deep sea canyon that conveys strong swell ashore there, swell that often gets kicked by the concrete reef into a sweet shape. This wiki article has a good aerial photo.
Here is the beach (with a Los Angeles Dept Water and Power generation plant in the background):
How will this affect EV drivers? 
The Captain 
I have never had a car fire. I do not know what I am missing.
¿What I am missing?
The Captain
What you missing?
Seems like an open ended question
Not much, except for plug-in hybrids. Of course, EVs make up less than 4% of the cars in California. And then there are a couple million diesel trucks, so a pretty big economic impact.
DB2
Just last fall, the state legislature passed, and Governor Maura Healey signed into law, a bill titled An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity, and protecting ratepayers, referred to as the 2024 Energy Act. This legislation puts a great emphasis on industrial size battery energy storage systems (BESS)…
By way of scale the NFPA Standard 855 is limited to batteries with an energy storage capacity of 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) or less. Such a battery might be used for emergency blackout protection in an office building…Giant batteries 80 times bigger than Standard 855 allows are not adequately covered by that standard. Unfortunately, as of yet there are no national standards for batteries of this scale.
In some aspects, applying 855 would be catastrophically wrong. For example, 855 says that when there are multiple batteries, they should be three feet apart so if one burns it will not ignite its neighbors. That tiny spacing would provide no protection in the case of the giant batteries being mandated in Massachusetts.
DB2