A blast and fire at a dairy farm in the Texas Panhandle on Monday night left one worker hospitalized and thousands of cows dead.
Southfork Dairy Farm in Castro County was rocked by an explosion at about 7:30 p.m. on April 10, per NBC 5 DFW.
First responders were able to rescue a worker who had been trapped inside the milking facility.
After receiving medical treatment from an EMS team from Amarillo Medical Response, the victim was taken to a hospital in Lubbock by helicopter. The person is said to be in critical condition, per KCBD.
Other farm employees had successfully exited the buildings, and no further injuries have been reported.
On the other hand, the fire that ensued after the explosion reportedly killed as many as 18,000 of the 19,000 dairy cattle present on the farm.
According to initial reports, the blaze is believed to have originated in the dairy building and then spread into the holding pens where the cows were housed, killing them by either smoke or fire.
“There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed,” Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told reporters, per KFDA.
The few surviving cows were brought to another nearby farm owned by Southfork Dairy.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality serving the Amarillo region arrived at the farm Tuesday morning to assist with the cleanup and disposal of carcasses.
While the exact reason for the fire is still under investigation, Sheriff Rivera suggested that methane gas may have been ignited by overheating electrical equipment.
“I think [investigators are] trying to determine if it’s a machinery called a ‘honey wagon’ that sucks out the manure and water…it might’ve ignited the possibly, methane gas or something like that,” said Rivera, per Chron.
Because of their high-fiber diet, methane gas forms in the guts of cattle, per PBS. They emit it into the atmosphere via cow burps.
The Animal Welfare Institute started tracking barn fires in 2013, logging almost 6.5 million farm animal deaths, per KFDA.
This recent fire is one of the deadliest recorded by the organization yet.
Videos of the Southfork Dairy Farm fire circulated on social media, showing walls of smoke.
🔴TEXAS :#VIDEO EXPLOSION AND MASSIVE FIRE AT SOUTH FORK DAIRY FARM NEAR DIMMIT,
leaves one person in critical condition.
18,000 cattle were killed.#BreakingNews #UltimaHora #Dimmit #SouthFork #Explosion #Fire #Incendio #Incendie
📹by @Key2Eternity pic.twitter.com/Z8plMdZPvN— LoveWorld (@LoveWorld_Peopl) April 12, 2023
“It was very big, I was north of Dimmitt and was able to see it heading this way, coming to the location you could tell the magnitude of it, it was really big. I’ve seen buildings fully engulfed with fire and smoke, it was just big,” said Sheriff Rivera, per KFDA.
As The Dallas Express reported in late March, an explosion rocked a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania, killing seven people. While the exact cause is still being investigated, the preliminary ruling of the National Transportation Safety Board has classified it as a natural gas explosion.
