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15-04-2023
HOUSTON: Approximately 18,000 cows were killed in a blast at a Texas dairy farm earlier this week, according to local authorities.
The explosion, at South Fork Dairy near the town of Dimmitt, also left one person in critical condition.
Authorities believe that machinery in the facility may have ignited methane gas.
Nearly three million farm animals died in fires across the US between 2018 and 2021. Castro County Sheriff’s Office said they had received a report of a fire at the farm at about 19:21 on Monday (00:21 GMT Tuesday).
Photos posted by the Sheriff’s Office show a huge plume of black smoke rising from the ground. When police and emergency personnel arrived at the scene, they found one person trapped who had to be rescued and flown to hospital in critical condition.
While the exact figure of cows that were killed by fire and smoke remains unknown, the Sheriff’s Office told media that an “estimated 18,000 head of cattle” had been lost.
Speaking to local news outlet KFDA, Sheriff Sal Rivera said that most of the cattle had been lost after the blaze spread to an area in which cows were held before being taken to a milking area and then into a holding pen.
“There’s some that survived,” he was quoted as saying. “There’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed.”
Rivera told KFDA that investigators believed the fire might have started with a machine referred to as a “honey badger”, which he described as “vacuum that sucks the manure and water out”.
“Possibly (it) got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded,” he said.
In a statement sent to media, the Washington DC-based Animal Welfare Institute said that if confirmed, a death toll of 18,000 cows would be “by far” the deadliest barn fire involving cattle since it began keeping statistics in 2013.
“We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt common sense fire safety measures,” said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI’s farm animal program. “It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive.”
According to the AWI, nearly 6.5m farm animals have been killed in barn fires since 2013, of which about 6m were chickens and about 7,300 were cows.
Between 2018 and 2021, nearly 3 million farm animals died in fire, with 1.76m chickens dying in the six largest fires over that time period.
Initial reports say that upwards of 18,000 cattle were lost in the fire last night at the South Fork Dairy in Dimmitt.
At this time, we know only a small percentage of the cows at the facility survived.
The surviving cattle have moved to a separate facility that has the same owner as South Fork Dairy.
Sheriff Sal Rivera says the fire from the explosion spread to the building where they haul cattle before bringing them into the milking area and into a holding pen. Because of this, Sheriff Rivera says only a small percentage of cows survived.
“Your count probably is close to that. There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed,” said Castro County Sheriff, Sal Rivera.
According to the Animal Welfare Institute, this fire is by far the deadliest barn fire for cattle overall and the most devastating barn fire in Texas since they began tracking barn fires in 2013.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Amarillo Region arrived on scene at around 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday and are assisting the dairy owner with carcass disposal/debris issues. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
