On Jan. 1 (letters to the editor), Scott Murtishaw, executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance, delivered a masterclass in corporate doublespeak — a polished performance that only a seasoned lobbyist could present with a straight face. His letter reads like a greatest hits album of industry talking points, carefully choreographed to dance around one burning truth: They are playing Russian roulette with our lives, and they won’t be around when the chamber finally clicks.  Let’s unpack Mr. Murtishaw’s carefully constructed facade. While he extols the virtues of these facilities from his comfortable office in Berkeley — safely removed from any lithium battery installations — families within 1,000 feet of the Canyon Country lithium battery storage facility are left wondering how they never received the supposedly mailed notifications about a project that fundamentally alters their lives. Perhaps these notices got lost in the same alternate reality where battery fires are considered “easily manageable incidents.”  It’s obvious that the Gateway Energy Storage Facility in Otay Mesa didn’t get Mr. Murtishaw’s memo about safety. For 17 excruciating days, that “perfectly safe” facility burned like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, while firefighters — those real-world experts Mr. Murtishaw conveniently ignores — watched helplessly as their standard protocols proved worse than useless. Here’s a detail Mr. Murtishaw’s polished presentation forgot to mention: Firefighters have discovered, through painful experience, that both water and firefighting foam can actually cause these batteries to explode. Let that sink in: The very tools our first responders rely on to fight fires become weapons of destruction when dealing with these facilities.  In Arizona, eight firefighters learned this lesson the hard way, suffering serious injuries while battling a lithium battery storage facility inferno that their traditional training hadn’t prepared them for. Yet Mr. Murtishaw’s organization continues to peddle the fiction that these facilities pose no unusual risks to emergency responders.  Our City Council, eager to please Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden’s green energy mandates, took mere months to approve what amounts to a potential chemical weapon in our backyard — the same council that agonized over a simple apartment complex proposal for four years because of parking spaces. This isn’t just incompetence; it’s political theater. The California Energy Storage Alliance’s fingerprints are all over this production, with lobbyists whispering sweet nothings about “green progress” into the ears of politicians who seem to have forgotten their primary duty is to protect their constituents, not their campaign coffers.  Let’s talk about those safety standards Mr. Murtishaw so proudly touts. In Valley Center, your industry’s “gold standard” protocols turned a quiet San Diego County community into what hazmat teams literally described as a “chemical warfare zone.” Residents within a mile were evacuated, while those up to 2 miles away huddled in their homes, hoping their air filters could handle hydrofluoric acid and heavy metal particulates. The McMicken facility explosion in Arizona caused an extensive cascading thermal runaway event, initiated by a single internal cell failure. The Morris, Illinois, inferno drove thousands from their homes as lithium-ion batteries exploded like artillery shells. The Victorian Big Battery fire in Australia burned uncontrollably for three days, blanketing nearby communities in toxic smoke. Each of these catastrophes adds another blood-stained chapter to an industry story steeped in negligence — a story Mr. Murtishaw conveniently omits.  Mr. Murtishaw’s safety assurances ring particularly hollow when confronted with the industry’s own technical analysis. After the McMicken disaster, a comprehensive technical report by the Arizona Public Service (Document No. 10209302-HOU-R-01) delivered a damning conclusion: “While today’s energy storage safety codes and standards acknowledge cascading thermal runaway as a risk, they stop short of prohibiting it and fail to address the risk of non-flaming heat transfer to neighboring cells, modules, and racks.” In plain terms, the industry knows these facilities can trigger unstoppable chain reactions of exploding batteries, yet safety standards fail to prevent it. Let that sink in.  The most chilling aspect of Mr. Murtishaw’s letter isn’t what it says — it’s what it doesn’t say. There’s no mention of the Lake Ontario disaster, where residents still battle unexplained health issues. No acknowledgment of Monterey County’s Moss Landing facility, where repeated failures between 2018 and 2022 turned a pristine bay into a chemical testing ground. And certainly, no discussion of who pays for decontamination when — not if — these incidents occur in our community.  Instead, we get carefully massaged statistics and vague assurances from a man whose paycheck depends on not understanding the very real risks these facilities pose. Meanwhile, elected officials, from city council members to state representatives, seem more interested in scoring political points with their “green energy” credentials than protecting the communities they serve. They’ve traded their backbone for a pat on the head from Sacramento, while Mr. Murtishaw’s organization quietly helps draft the very regulations they later claim to exceed.  To Mr. Murtishaw and his colleagues at the California Energy Storage Alliance: The smoke screen isn’t working. More than 1,000 real people — mothers, fathers, children, elderly — live within 1,000 feet of your next “perfectly safe” experiment. Their lives aren’t statistical anomalies to be managed with PR strategies; they’re human beings who never consented to be guinea pigs in your grand green energy gamble.  The truth isn’t hidden in the fine print of industry-funded studies. It’s written in evacuation orders, emergency response reports, and medical records from communities already scarred by these disasters. It’s etched in the burn scars of firefighters who discovered firsthand that these fires don’t play by the rules.   If Mr. Murtishaw is so confident in the safety of these facilities, perhaps he’d consider relocating his office — and those of our City Council members and city manager — to within that 1,000-foot radius they’re so certain is perfectly safe?  You can keep your carefully worded assurances. We’ll keep fighting for our right to not become another case study in your growing collection of “isolated incidents.”  Tony Maldonado Canyon Country The post Tony Maldonado | A Masterclass in Doublespeak appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.