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Explosion at Texas dairy farm kills 18,000 cows
While very few survived, “there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed"
April 14, 2023 8:52am
Updated: April 14, 2023 8:52am
An explosion at a family dairy farm in west Texas on Monday left more than 18,000 cows dead and one person critically injured, in one of the most devastating barn fires in the country, authorities said.
The explosion took place at South Fork Dairy near Dimmit, Texas at around 7:30 p.m. on Monday, according to the Castro County Sheriff’s Office. The explosion caused a fire, which spread to the cow holding area as they were being brought in for milking.
Around 18,000 cows died engulfed in flames. While very few survived, “there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed," Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said.
The explosion also left one employee, a woman, trapped inside the milking building. She was rescued from the building and airlifted to a hospital in Lubbock, about 80 miles from Dimmitt.
“While devastating, I’m grateful that there were no further injuries,” Sid Miller, the Texas agricultural commissioner, said in a statement.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, said the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office.
"The speculation was probably what they call a honey badger, which is a vacuum that sucks the manure and water out, and possibly that it got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded and the fire," Rivera told local outlet KSAT.
After the tragic incident, the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal protection group, urged U.S. policymakers to establish federal laws to prevent barn fires and save the lives of thousands of farm animals. According to the organization, more than 6.5 million animals have died in fires during the last decade.
The incident marks one of the most devastating barn fires involving cattle in the nation since 2013, when AWI started tracking the incidents.
According to AWI, there are no federal regulations protecting animals from fires and only a few states have established fire protection codes. Texas, however, is not among them.
