The Texas company that built a huge battery storage plant at Moss Landing that burned in a major fire last month, causing the evacuation of 1,200 people and the closure of Highway 1 for three days, rushed to build the plant and cut corners resulting in unsafe conditions, a lawsuit filed Thursday alleges.

One of the largest electricity providers in the United States, the company, Vistra, stacked 100,000 batteries in an aging, concrete building at a former 1950s-era PG&E natural gas plant when it built the facility five years ago, and used a type of battery at higher risk for runaway fires than other available technologies, the suit says.

“It’s an environmental tragedy that didn’t have to happen,” said Joe Cotchett, a Burlingame attorney who filed the lawsuit. “Had Vistra done a proper job in storing these batteries properly this would have never happened.

“Had they set up a system for stopping any fire that could happen, this would have never happened,” he added. “There’s a combination of errors here.”

Officials for Vistra, based in Irving, Texas, said Thursday they would have no comment.

“Moss Landing is not only home to our facility, it’s home to our employees and neighbors,” the company said in a statement this week on a website it created to inform the community about the fire and upcoming cleanup. “We are committed to doing everything we can to do right by our community and are working in concert with federal, state, and local agencies to ensure public health and safety.”

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose is the third lawsuit filed against Vistra by residents and business owners since the fire on Jan. 16. One, filed Feb. 6 by a San Diego firm, Singleton Schreiber, has the involvement of environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who was portrayed by Julia Roberts in a 2000 Oscar-winning movie that documented her battle against PG&E over groundwater pollution in Hinkley, a small desert town in San Bernardino County.

“Lawsuits like this are to be expected when a facility has a major fire,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University.

“But this may be the biggest battery fire we ever see,” he said, noting that new battery storage plants do not stack batteries inside like the Moss Landing plant did, often have batteries outside in self-contained units so that a fire doesn’t spread, and use a newer battery chemistry, lithium-iron-phosphate, which is less prone to fires.

“This facility would not be built today,” Mulvaney said. “It didn’t have adequate containment to keep a fire from spreading.”

Thursday’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of Kim and Luis Solano, who own the Haute Enchilada restaurant and gallery in Moss Landing, which they have closed indefinitely due to a major drop in business after the fire. The couple also own five vacation rental properties and say they have suffered cancellations and concerns about their health.

Cotchett said he expects to file a class-action lawsuit in the coming days and weeks on behalf of other local residents, seeking damages and forcing the company to provide ongoing medical monitoring of people who were exposed to the toxic smoke from the burning batteries, which contained heavy metals like nickel, manganese, and cobalt.

The lawsuit said Vistra was racing to convert the old PG&E plant into one of the world’s largest battery storage plants in 2020 to meet deadlines set by the California Public Utilities Commission and other agencies, and acted negligently.

“The battery storage method Vistra employed was unsafe, unstable, and prone to creating, in effect, a chemical and heavy metal powder keg if one or more battery modules were to fail and catch fire,” the suit states.

The blaze, whose cause has not yet been determined, spread a toxic cloud across miles of residential and farm areas near the Santa Cruz-Monterey county border. Even though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced three days after the fire that “results for hydrogen fluoride and particulate matter showed no risk to public health throughout the incident, and smoke from the facility has greatly diminished,” hundreds of residents in the area complained of respiratory problems, sore throats, a metallic taste and other health concerns.

The incident has given the battery storage industry — which is key to expanding renewable energy in California — a major public relations problem.

Across California, large battery storage plants are being planned and constructed in dozens of locations at a pace faster than anywhere else in the United States. They are a critical part of the state’s plans to expand renewable energy, by storing electricity that solar farms and wind turbines generate to use later when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

There are now 187 battery storage plants in California — up from just 17 in 2019, according to the California Energy Commission. Battery storage has increased 1,343% in the past six years in California, from 928 megawatts in 2019 to 13,391 megawatts today. A megawatt is enough electricity to run 750 homes.

Assemblywoman Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, has introduced a bill, AB 303, that would block construction of new battery storage plants within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, hospitals and businesses.

Mulvaney, an expert in the technology, said state regulators need to provide more oversight.

“If I were the state I would immediately require all these facilities to be inspected to give the public peace of mind,” he said. “We can’t have another fire. This has been too big of a hit on the industry. Batteries are too important to expand renewable energy. We need more of them.”