The fire spread quickly through the holding pens, where thousands of dairy cows crowded together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confines.
After subduing the fire at the west Texas dairy farm on Monday, April 10th, officials were stunned at the scale of livestock death left behind: 18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas – or about 20% of the cattle slaughtered in America on any given day.
A dairy farm worker rescued from inside the structure was taken to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition as of Tuesday. There were no other human casualties.
The fire spread quickly through the holding pens, where thousands of dairy cows crowded together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confines.
After subduing the fire at the west Texas dairy farm Monday evening, officials were stunned at the scale of livestock death left behind: 18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas – or about 20% of the cattle slaughtered in America on any given day.
A dairy farm worker rescued from inside the structure was taken to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition as of Tuesday. There were no other human casualties.
Rick Jervis
Thu, April 13, 2023 at 11:44 AM CST
Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story miscalculated the number of head of cattle slaughtered each day in the U.S.
The fire spread quickly through the holding pens, where thousands of dairy cows crowded together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confines.
After subduing the fire at the west Texas dairy farm Monday evening, officials were stunned at the scale of livestock death left behind: 18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas – or about 20% of the cattle slaughtered in America on any given day.
A dairy farm worker rescued from inside the structure was taken to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition as of Tuesday. There were no other human casualties.
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“It’s mind-boggling,” Dimmitt Mayor Roger Malone said. “I don’t think it’s ever happened before around here. It’s a real tragedy.”
It was the biggest single-incident death of cattle in the country since the Animal Welfare Institute, a Washington-based animal advocacy group, began tracking barn and farm fires in 2013.
That easily surpassed the previous high: a 2020 fire at an upstate New York dairy farm that consumed about 400 cows, said Allie Granger, a policy associate at the institute.
The Texas fire “is the deadliest fire involving cattle we know of,” she said. “In the past, we have seen fires involving several hundred cows at a time, but nothing anything near this level of mortality.”
Where was the Texas cattle fire?
Castro County, site of the fire, is open prairie land dotted with dairy farms and cattle ranches about 70 miles southwest of Amarillo.
Pictures posted on social media by bystanders showed the large plume of black smoke lifting from the farm fire, as well as charred cows that were saved from the structure.
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What caused the dairy farm explosion?
A malfunction in a piece of farm equipment may have caused an explosion that led to the fire, said County Judge Mandy Gfeller, the county’s top executive. Texas fire officials are still investigating the cause, she said.
Malone, the mayor, said he wasn’t aware of any other fires reported at the facility. He said the dairy had opened in the area just over three years ago and employed 50 to 60 people.
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